Here’s How to Stock Your Butler’s Pantry Like a Downton Abbey Heiress

Indeed, there remains a dress code for dinner. In the style of the aristocratic Crawleys, and Bright Young Things and Brideshead before, the innate formality calls for Stoke-on-Trent china, ancestral silver, and linen finery. But 21st-century versions replace the butler’s stick with decidedly more bravado: Mismatched export china is arranged atop vibrantly patterned tablecloths, and heirloom cut crystal pairs with casual colored glassware for a relaxed adaptation of evening entertaining that everyone (save Carson) might readily embrace.