Design gifts for men

Nothing here is designed for a man or for a woman. It is crystal, brass and polished steel, cut to a geometric rule. So this is not a list of things in grey. It is the pieces that tend to land when you are buying for someone who has a desk he cares about, or a table he set himself.

For the desk

The most reliable category, because it is used every day and nobody buys it for themselves.

  • Cloud – Desk Tidy — solid brass, two overlapping dot grids that produce a moiré as you move past. It ships flat and folds together in about twenty seconds, and the folding is genuinely half the pleasure.
  • Gravity – Pen Holder — a steel grid warped as though something heavy had been put down in the middle of it.
  • Penrose – Pen Tray — the Penrose tiling, which covers a surface forever without ever repeating. Milled in Italy, folded in Berlin.
  • Manhattan – Bookmark — Central Park from above, in brass.

For the table

  • Penrose – 2 Coasters — the same aperiodic pattern, in a pair. Good for anyone who has ever argued about grids.
  • Hover – Heat Stand — a disc that sits a measured distance above the table, just far enough to throw a shadow.
  • Push – Catch All — for keys, coins and whatever comes out of a pocket at the end of the day. Shaped by hand from a flat disc.
  • Gravity – Tray — the warped grid at table scale, in reflective steel.

For the shelf, when the budget is not the constraint

  • Drops – Bookends — crystal spheres set into solid crystal blocks. They hold books up and they are hard to stop looking at.
  • Gravity – Centerpiece — the large warped grid. The Centre Pompidou commissioned its own colourway of this one.
  • Cobalt – Eclipse Table Lamp — solid cobalt crystal that shifts between opaque and translucent depending on where you stand.

One piece of advice

Buy the thing he will put on a desk, not the thing he will have to display. Brass gets handled and improves; crystal gets admired and moved. If you are not sure which he is, the desk pieces are the safer half of the shop.

More: design gifts by price · gifts for architects and designers · gifts made in Berlin.