Soft launching for UK & US customers.
One thoughtful email a month, not a marketing torrent. New makers, seasonal edits, and the stories behind the craft.
How we look after your details: privacy policy
I spend a lot of my time in other people's workshops, which has ruined me for ordinary shopping. You watch somebody spend a morning on a thing the size of your palm, and then you pick up its equivalent in a shop, made by a machine in four seconds, and the difference is not sentimental. It is in your hand.
September is when everyone moves, which means a good number of people are currently standing in a magnolia box with a laminate floor, holding a crate of things that looked better in the last place. Every large decision in a rented flat has been made for you and none of them was good. You cannot paint it. You certainly cannot touch the kitchen.
So the whole job falls to objects, and the usual answer is twenty cheap ones bought in a single afternoon, which gets you beige with clutter on top of it. Nine instead. Every one made by somebody, and every one earning its place by being used.
Start here, because it costs less than lunch and it is the only thing on this list made with a skill almost nobody has left. Lucy plaits these from straw in Layer de la Haye, the way harvest tokens were once given as favours. It hangs on a nail. In a room with nothing on the walls, one small thing somebody made reads as intent, where a poster reads as filler.
A sheet of marbled paper in a clip frame is the cheapest real art you will ever own, and nobody who sees it will guess what you paid for it. The colour is floated on water and lifted off in a single pass, so the pattern happened once and will not happen again. Frame it, line a drawer with it, or back a shelf so the inside of the cupboard is better than the outside.
A brush good enough to hang up rather than hide under the sink. Tampico is a stiff plant fibre, bound by hand in Crieff, and this will still be sweeping crumbs off a table in fifteen years. The test for a rented kitchen is whether an object can sit out on the worktop without making the worktop look worse. This one passes.
Nobody buys a doorstop until they have lived with a door that swings shut every time a window is open. This is spun from dead stock rope, the cotton and flax left over when a production run ends, and it has a weight that plastic never manages. It also does what good objects do in a bare room, which is give the eye somewhere to land at floor level.
An original oil painting for sixty pounds. Read that again, because most people assume original means four figures and settle for a print of somebody else's. Jessica works colour first and one canvas at a time, and this is small enough to prop on a shelf rather than commit to a wall, which matters when the wall belongs to somebody else and the drill is not allowed.
The highest-leverage change available to a landlord's sofa, which is almost always grey and almost always too firm. Pieced by hand in Sheffield from linen, in a grid that is deliberately a little off. Two of these will do more for a room than a rug, and unlike a rug they come with you and still work in the next place.
A swill is a basket woven from thin strips of boiled oak over a hazel rim, and it has been the answer to "where does this go" in British houses for several hundred years. Logs, laundry, the shoes by the door, all the things that otherwise live in a heap. It is storage you are pleased to see, which is not a sentence anyone has written about a plastic box.
The place the keys go, so that you stop losing them. Claire works from a farm workshop in Staffordshire, and the point of a box like this is that it is the same box in ten years and in thirty. Oak and ash together, so the grain does two different things in one object. Put it by the front door and it becomes the thing everyone touches on the way out.
If you buy one thing here and the flat is very beige, buy the thing that goes on the wall. A quilt hung rather than laid, hand stitched in Sheffield, soft enough to take the echo out of a room with bare floors. It is the only piece on this list that changes how a room sounds as well as how it looks.
The marbled paper, at thirteen pounds fifty. Not because it is cheapest, but because it is the one that changes what you think is possible. Frame a sheet of paper somebody made by hand, hang it in a rented hallway, and you stop buying posters.
Several of these are made to order, so give them a little time before you need them.
