Basics and beyond. Buy your stuff here

http://www.basicsandbeyond.com.au/

About half way up the Fitzgerald Street shopping strip your eyes will be drawn to a non-calorific candy-store for growups. If you are culinary-minded or creative in your creature comforts or enjoy brightly-coloured and shiny things then you will stop in your tracks at Basics and Beyond.

Angelo Tancredi has 10 years' experience of retail in London and has been operating in North Perth since 2008. His establishment has made a welcome splash of desire and enticement on the Fitzgerald High Street with its nod to the enticing and hard-working shop-fronts of the most popular of London's many village high-streets. In fact, it makes me feel like I'm back in Islington, Upper Street to be exact. Only I won't have to lease an internal organ to make a purchase.

Among the many, many gorgeous objects such as retro starburst clocks or a set of Japanese laquer-ware rice bowls I may want for my birthday, is the Cook Ware section. And it's good. And by that I mean Well Thought Out: There is a wall of practical blister-packed gadgets (I came away with things I needed; an oven thermometer, a set of ceramic blind-baking beads). There are another two walls of solid, sensible equipment including a cabinet of good knives and possibly the entire Scan Pan range. We all know we could update and expand our stock of baking sheets and chopping boards, that's common sense if you are a keen cook ( I also slipped in to my stash a bamboo meat carving board complete with a channel for the juices. The kind of thing you see on mortuary slabs).

There are tables laden with every kind of cake tin known to man, stacked and glistening like the turrets of castle. Why, yes, I do need a mini bund-tin as it happens. The tables also offer new things, so new in fact that they were featured on the ABC TV show The New Inventors only last month. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/newinventors/txt/s2958807.htm : Clongs. click-lock sit up tongs. No more cacky counter tops when tossing carbonara. Angelo has them already, 9" of them at $24.95. http://www.dreamfarm.com.au/products/clongs/. I need a pair. Oh, and know someone in my household who needs a teafu http://www.dreamfarm.com.au/products/teafu.







Those are the Basics.

And now comes Angelo's master-stroke: The Beyonds. One turns to be sensible and complete the purchases but brushes against the really magical section of the shop's design and this is the shelves that blend from classy kitchen ware to funky gardening gloves re-usable plastic bags that seem to be made from a Hollywood Starlet's photo ablum and then the complete range of Urban Rituelle toiletries http://www.urbanrituelle.com/mmm.. Pomegranite. And one cannot ignore the cases of jewels and trinkets and the blatant, outright frippery.

Well why not? I have the Basics, and it is hardly my fault if to pay for them I am led to the Beyond. And you know what? I'll take trio of onyx photo frames for teacher's presents at xmas, and a few blocks of Margret River made http://www.oliveoilsoapfactory.com.au/ soaps while I'm here. And a handful of no-message greetings cards because the art of old-fashioned letter writing is dying. And look there's my real birthday present, I changed my mind; The Venturi red wine aerator pleaes http://vinturi.com/products/vinturi.html ...... Time to stop now. But I'll be going home and looking online for anything that may have got away.




Basics and Beyond
293 Fitzgerald Street
North Perth
08 9227 0304








The Angel food cake tin has three prongs evenly spaced around the rim. We don't know why. However it is my mission to find out and the item in and of itself is a thing of beauty. Watch this space. I imagine there will be a lady in the New Forest who will have an idea.










This is an onion-saver. You store the remainder of you onion in it to keep it fresh and your fridge fresh. Angelo tells me the shoplifters of North Perth have had three of these away in one week.