Gifts & Lifestyle

For the person you cannot buy for

Everything on this page is wood, cut and engraved rather than printed, and made to be used rather than displayed: notebooks and sketchbooks whose covers outlast their pages, boxes that carry a bottle and stay, handbags with solid oak sides. Nothing needs a battery, none of it is a novelty, and none of it is designed to end up in a drawer.

Below, six people who are difficult to buy for, and what tends to work – from this page and from the rest of the workshop.

What do you give someone who travels?

A wooden world map and a set of flag pins is the gift that keeps arriving. The map goes on the wall once; the pins go in one at a time, for years, every time they come back from somewhere. There are 291 flags on the printed cards, each named underneath, in sections for the countries of the world, the US states, the Canadian provinces and the Australian states.

From this page, the Travel notebook: a compass rose engraved on warm brown birch with an arrow through it, the journey drawn around it – an aircraft, mountains, two sailing boats – and a hundred lined, dated sheets inside for where they went and when. Its sketchbook twin puts the same cover over blank watercolour paper, which takes tickets and pressed things as easily as drawing.

What do you give someone who has just moved?

The hardest gift of all, because they have everything except things on the walls. A new flat has empty plaster and no time to think about it.

A framed map panel solves that with one fixing in a few minutes, no tape, and if they are renting it comes down cleanly and moves with them. The smaller flat maps work in a hallway, which is the wall people forget when they move in and notice for years afterwards. And the bottle you bring to the housewarming goes in one of our wooden boxes, which stays on the kitchen shelf after the cork comes out.

What do you give someone who drinks wine seriously?

The problem is that the obvious gift is a bottle, and their bottles are better than yours.

A wine map divides France or Italy by wine region, with the vineyards raised on the wood, and goes in a dining room, a kitchen or beside a cellar door. Or, if you are giving a bottle anyway, one of our boxes carries it and outlasts it, and each comes with a flat oval holder that sits on the neck of the bottle and carries two glasses. One of them has a round hole through its front inside a wreath of vine leaves, a perch below it and three birds on a branch at the foot: empty the bottle, hang the box in a tree, and it spends the rest of its life as a nesting box.

What do you give someone who draws or writes?

Wooden covers on a replaceable paper block. The block is consumable and the cover is not, which turns a notebook from stationery into an object that outlasts several of them.

The notebooks carry a hundred lined sheets, each headed with a date line; the sketchbooks carry blank paper, watercolour stock on most. Both open on rings, so pages lie completely flat and come out cleanly, and the rigid cover doubles as something to press on – drawing on a knee or standing up is possible with a board behind the paper and awkward without one.

What do you give someone who makes things?

A carving kit contains a real knife, wood, a pattern and everything needed to finish, so there is no trip to three shops before anything starts. The paint kits are the gentler version: five or six wooden layers that build into a landscape inside an animal, six paints and a brush.

Both produce an object at the end of an evening, which most things people do to relax do not.

What do you give someone who already has everything?

The ones people do not know exist. An Italian wine map, which shows that all twenty Italian regions produce wine – a fact drinkers know abstractly and have never seen laid out. A wooden handbag, a stained birch body with solid oak side panels, felt-lined, that holds its shape whether it is full or empty. A cardboard sculpture built from up to 130 numbered slices on rods, with no glue and no tools.

The test for this person is not quality, which they can buy. It is whether the object is unfamiliar enough to be worth their attention.

Why give wood?

Because it lasts, which sounds like a slogan and is really an argument about waste. A notebook cover outlives a dozen blocks. A wine box outlives the bottle and usually several after it. A map put up in a rented flat comes down and goes up again somewhere else. None of it is designed to be replaced.

What arrives ready to give?

The flag pins, on printed cards in a kraft sleeve with a world map on the cover. The wooden handbags, in a wooden box. The gift-box puzzles, in a wooden box with a sliding lid and a cord tie, printed with the finished image. And the wine boxes, which are the wrapping. Notebooks and sketchbooks arrive as they are, and orders leave our warehouse without a card or a message, so write yours at home.

For company gifting, events or client presents we engrave notebooks, sketchbooks and wine boxes in quantity – a logo, a date, a message. Terms on our wholesale page.