This Artist Flew Nearly 50 Pounds of Colorful Pasta Across the Country for Gigi Hadid's Colorful Cabinet Doors
Earlier this year, Linda Miller Nicholson nervously waited by the luggage return area at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City to retrieve what she tells House Beautiful was her "most precious cargo ever." She had flown to the east coast from Seattle with what she estimated to be nearly 50 pounds of pasta. This vivid mix of farfalle, tagliatelle, garganelli were the ingredients needed for one of her most groundbreaking projects: Gigi Hadid’s kitchen cabinet doors.
Recently, Hadid shared photos of her colorful NYC digs on Instagram. Among the many standout elements of her space was its kitchen cabinets, which feature brightly colored pasta pieces in glass displays.
To pull off this unique design feat—which the supermodel recently referred to as her "dream pasta-facade-cabinets" via Instagram Stories—Hadid tapped pasta artist extraordinaire Linda Miller Nicholson. Nicholson, author of the cookbook Pasta, Pretty Please, rose to fame for her ability to transform the typical yellow-white starchy fare into a colorful collage of all shapes and colors. Peek at her Instagram, @saltyseattle, and you'll find snaps of all her stunning work — which includes pasta art of Baby Yoda and the Today Show's Kathy Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb. But besides being aesthetically pleasing, her handmade colorful pasta dough is healthier and more flavorful than most as it derives its color naturally from vegetables, herbs, and superfoods — no artificial dyes.
But whipping up this eye-catching pasta for the home? That’s one recipe she had never tested. "I've been creating pasta art for about six years now, but generally speaking it's been for human consumption," Nicholson tells House Beautiful.
"Initially when Gigi started asking for the pasta project, I was thinking in my head ‘no it's going to be so impossible,’" she calls. She even admits that she tried floating the idea of putting photographs of pasta behind the glass; however, Hadid's heart was set on the real deal.
For months, Nicholson sought to find a foolproof way to preserve the pasta and keep it structurally stable over time — even factoring in how the NYC subways that ran near the apartment could jostle the pieces. “Kinda grateful to Gigi for helping me flex a creative muscle that's different from my M.O.,” Nicholson tells us, but looking back to the start of this project, it seemed almost *impastable.*
As with all of her pasta creations, Nicholson started with eggs, flour, and an assortment of vegetables. Ingredients like parsley, spinach, and kale gave the green pasta its hue. Beets, blueberries, and a variety of peppers colored the red pasta. Dragonfruit, blueberries, and butterfly pea flowers tinted the blue and purplish toned pasta. Creating pasta art is where Nicholson thrives. But now came the hard part: a two-part preservation process.
The pasta first underwent an intense boiling and drying process which lasted a few days. The next part took Nicholson about a month as she lacquered every noodle by hand. Yep, each farfalle, tagliatelle, and garganelli piece got a delicate coating. “I had personally held each piece in my fingertips for about 15 minutes," she says of the extremely precise process.
Due to COVID-19 and the project's size, the artist worked in her main studio in Seattle, although she does have a workspace in NYC. This created the next obstacle: getting thousands of noodles to Hadid’s NYC apartment. She considered driving the pasta art cross-country, but after much thought, she decided to transport it via plane, carefully checking and inspecting each piece post-flight. “Every piece was more or less intact,” she says.
Despite a few more delays along the way (such as the apartment not being ready), the various different styles of pasta Nicholson had created did safely make it to their new home. She explains that she worked on five cabinet doors ( Hadid's Instagram photo only shows four) and each door had its own glass facade equipped with a three-inch pocket that lined with a white backing. Numerous farfalle, tagliatelle, and garganelli noodles, all separated by color, were sandwiched between the glass exterior and backing, creating the unique pasta display of Gigi Hadid's kitchen.
While Nicholson usually whips up her pasta art for clients to enjoy right away, this project transformed her work into a mini kitchen gallery that will never go stale.
Interested in creating your own pasta art? You can shop Nicholson's colorful doughs here.
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