Housewarming gifts for someone with good taste

The hard version of this problem is a friend whose flat is better than yours. Everything in it has been chosen. There are no gaps, there is no obvious empty shelf, and whatever you bring is going to be judged by a person with a good eye standing in a room they have already finished.

One rule removes about eighty per cent of the wrong answers. Do not bring anything that has to agree with the room.

That rules out cushions, throws, prints, vases, anything with a pattern, anything in a colour, and most ceramics. Not because those are bad objects, but because you are asking somebody with a strong point of view to find a place for a decision you made without them. If it does not fit, they now have to either display something they do not like or feel guilty about not displaying it. Neither is a gift.

What is left is more interesting than it sounds.

Consumables, at a level they would not buy. A good olive oil, a proper salt, a coffee from a roaster you have to queue at, a bottle of wine that is above what anyone buys on a Tuesday. It gets used, it gets talked about, and it leaves no trace afterwards, which in a finished flat is a virtue rather than a failure.

Something for the drawer nobody photographs. A decent tape measure. A small torch that works. A fire blanket for the kitchen, which sounds like a strange gift and is the one people mention years later. Every beautiful flat has an ugly drawer, and almost nobody stocks it properly because nobody enjoys shopping for it.

A plant chosen for the light in that particular flat. Ask which way the windows face, and ask before the day. A plant that suits a north-facing room is a thoughtful object. A plant that needs six hours of sun in a flat that gets two is a slow problem you have handed to somebody else.

A meal on moving day. Not the housewarming party, the actual move. Somebody arriving at seven in the evening with real food, plates and a bin bag, when the kitchen is in boxes, is the most useful gift on this list by a distance. It costs almost nothing and nobody ever forgets it.

One thing made by a person. A bowl, a board, a small piece of glass, a drawing. The reason this works where a decorative object usually fails is that it carries its own justification. Even if it does not match, it is obviously a specific thing made by a specific pair of hands, and a person with a good eye tends to respect that even when it is not to their taste.

Your afternoon. Offer to help paint the hallway, or to be the second person carrying the wardrobe up the stairs. This is a real gift and it is the one people are most embarrassed to offer, which is odd, because it is the only one on the list that is genuinely hard to buy.

Now the candle question, because a housewarming gift candle is the default and I would like to be straight about why.

It is the default for good reasons. It costs about the right amount. It is not furniture. It does not need a wall or a shelf assigned to it. And there is an old, unfussy idea underneath it about bringing light into a new house, which is a better reason than most gift conventions have.

The reason so many of them fail is the fragrance. A scented candle is you choosing what somebody else's home smells like, in the first week, before they have decided themselves. It is the single most personal thing in the whole category, and the odds of getting it right for a person you do not live with are not good. It is also why so much of what is sold as a luxury candle gift is really an expensive guess about somebody else's air. A lot of them end up in a cupboard, lit once, by somebody being polite.

The way round it is to make the candle an object rather than a smell. Mine are unscented on purpose, which I have written about at length in why we do not scent our candles. Each one is a flower sculpted by hand from pure beeswax with a cotton wick, and it carries the faint honey smell of the wax and nothing else. It can sit unlit on a table for a year and still be doing its job, and it does not commit the house to anything.

It also passes the rule at the top of this page, more or less. A single flower in a natural wax colour is closer to a plant than to a cushion, and a room does not have to be reorganised around it. The bloom candles are single flower heads that sit flat on a table, and the stemmed ones stand in a vase they almost certainly already own.

On price: a housewarming is not a wedding, and there is no expectation of a large gift. Twenty euros of exceptional oil is a better gift than eighty euros of the wrong thing, and everybody in the room knows it. Spend more only if you are genuinely close, and if you are, spend it on one object rather than on a basket.

Two last things to avoid. Anything with a house on it, or the word home written across it, which is the housewarming equivalent of a novelty mug. And anything for a room they have not decided about yet. In the first month, most people do not yet know what the small bedroom is for.

The whole range is in the shop if you want to have a look, and if you know their flat well enough to have an opinion about the colour, custom orders are open.