Designer's Favorite Object - A Cast-Iron Skillet - Possessed - NYTimes.com Kevin Scanlon for The New York Times Paul Fortune in Los Angeles. THE world of fashion is not known for its cooking. This is a cast of characters, after all, that often looks at food the way the cast of "Twilight" looks at garlic. But a stray handful can dress their salads and themselves with equal élan. For example, the Irish-born interior designer Paul Fortune. His house, perched on a steep street in Laurel Canyon, north of Hollywood, has seen many more than its fair share of lunches, dinners and between-meal snacks. Because Mr. Fortune cooks easily, well and often. Still, he is known more for his styling than his cooking. His elegant 2004 redesign of the Sunset Tower Hotel transformed the Deco landmark into one of Los Angeles's hottest destinations, and he has decorated houses for maniacally finicky people like Marc Jacobs, James Truman, Aileen Getty and, most recently, the fashion and art worlds" zillion-dollar It girl, Dasha Zhukova. So it came as a surprise that when Mr. Fortune was asked about a favorite object, he chose an ordinary cast-iron skillet. Maybe "extraordinary" is more accurate. The skillet in question measures 3 inches deep and 20 inches across, giving it a heating surface of more than 2.2 square feet and a volume of more than 4 gallons: four times the area and eight times the volume of a standard 10-inch skillet. He found it in the early 1970s at an old hardware store in Las Vegas that stocked cast-iron cookware designed with mining camps in mind. "When I first came to America, I drove across the country, and I would stop in these weird towns in the middle of nowhere," he said. I was obsessed with stationery and hardware stores. I collected all this old stationery and staplers and erasers that were so beautifully packaged, and these great boxes of nails and screws and strange farm implements. The Las Vegas store where he found the skillet was the mother lode: a whole room full of old-fashioned cast-iron cookware. "I was going to buy a lot of it," he said. Then I remembered I was flying home, so I could only buy one. The fact that the skillet weighed 30 pounds and could easily cover two entire burners was not a deterrent. "I use it as a griddle, to grill steaks - everything," he said. I use it on my stovetop. I use it on the barbecue. I've made paella in the fireplace with it, which gets delicious because of the wood smoke. The pan is used even when it's not being used. "I'll just keep vegetables in it on the counter," he said. And the cat likes to take a nap in it. All told, it elicits his highest seal of approval: "It just works." With Mr. Fortune, something either works or it doesn't: a color, a chair, an outfit, a political system. When he bought the skillet, he didn't know that it would. Like many people, he has bought lovely copper-clad pans with bright dreams for their future, like the fish poacher he bought and used once. With the skillet, its future was murky. "I bought it because it was beautiful," he said. So I wasn't exactly possessed by it when I got it, but now I can't imagine life without it. And it's the one thing everyone wants when they come over. Enviers, take heart. Amazon.com sells a 20-inch cast-iron skillet from Bayou Classics for about $77, but its reviews are mixed, partly because several buyers underestimated how unwieldy it would be. One buyer found that seasoning it (that is, preparing the pan for use) was impossible as it wouldn't fit into the oven. "Potential alternative uses include a small neighborhood pool or in winter a semiportable ice skating rink," the reviewer added. But as Mr. Fortune would point out, the magic of the pan is that it works for him. In the end, beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. It has to be on the stove, too.