MOTHER OF INVENTION

At nearly seventy, Queensland grandmother Louise Barrett set out to solve the one problem no one in the cookware industry had bothered to address. Five years later, the world is paying attention.

There is a particular alchemy to a Sunday roast. The low, unhurried warmth of the oven. The smell that colonises every room. The way it draws people to the table before anyone has thought to call them. For Louise Barrett, who grew up on a cattle station in Queensland where roast night was less a meal than a ritual, that feeling has always been sacred — which made what came next feel, to her at least, like an obvious and urgent problem worth solving.

When Louise finally built her dream kitchen — the one she had imagined for decades — she turned her attention to the aftermath of all those beloved roasts: the splattered oven walls, the hardened grease, the scrubbing that followed every celebration. She went looking for a spatter guard. Something elegantly simple that would protect the oven during cooking. She searched thoroughly and found nothing. Because, it turned out, nothing existed.

So, at sixty-nine years old, she made one herself.

“It is, in the truest sense, a problem solved by someone who really felt the problem.”

What followed was five years of sketches, prototypes, and methodical persistence — qualities Louise had honed over a career in medical science. Factories proved unreliable. Designs had to be reimagined entirely. Engineers came and went. Through it all, she kept refining, drawing on the same iterative rigour that research demands and refusing to settle for less.

The result is the Hagane Home Ultimate Roaster — a premium 3-ply stainless steel roasting pan with a world-first vented spatter guard. The vented lid lets steam escape and hot air circulate freely, so roasts emerge golden and properly crisped rather than steamed, while keeping oven walls spotless. Induction-compatible, oven-safe to 260°C, dishwasher-safe, and built for a lifetime. The lid inverts into the base for storage. Nothing is incidental.

The food world has been quick to respond. Celebrated cookbook author Sophie Hansen cooks with her Ultimate Roaster weekly, using it for everything from classic roast chicken to streamlined weeknight dinners; she calls it the kind of piece you buy once and keep always. Food stylist and recipe developer Kate Flower praises the thoughtfulness of the design and its effortless performance both in the oven and on the stovetop.

Hagane Home is a family enterprise. Louise’s husband Bill supported her through every setback. Her son Scott built the business structure. Her daughter-in-law Bianka leads operations and marketing, sharing the belief that this is about something larger than cookware — the gathering of people around a home-cooked meal, and the rituals that bind us.

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, the Ultimate Roaster has found its way into kitchens across Australia and around the world — the UK, Singapore, the United States. It is stocked at select Harvey Norman stores and ships internationally from haganehome.com, backed by a lifetime warranty.

For Louise, the achievement still carries a trace of the improbable. A grandmother, entirely untrained in product design, who looked at a gap in the market and simply refused to accept it couldn’t be filled. The pan was born in her kitchen. And it was built, quite simply, for yours.

The Hagane Home Ultimate Roaster retails for $447 with free shipping within Australia. LOCALE readers receive 10% off with the code LOCALE10 at haganehome.com