Design gifts for women

Nothing in this shop is designed for a woman or for a man. It is crystal, brass and steel, cut to a geometric rule, and it does not know who owns it. So this page is not a list of pink things. It is a list of the pieces that tend to work when you are buying for someone whose taste you respect and whose shelves you have seen.

If she already has everything

This is the harder version of the question, and it has a decent answer: buy an object that does something rather than one that sits there.

• Push – Jewelry Bowl — arrives as a flat steel disc. She presses it into a bowl with her thumbs, and it will not look like anyone else’s. A gift that is finished by the person receiving it is difficult to already own.
• Rainbow – Candleholder — lead crystal with a dichroic film on every facet. Crystal splits light; the film amplifies it, so the colour moves as the flame does. It is not a candleholder that stays the same all evening.
• Gravity – Tealight Holder — a warped steel grid that reads differently from every seat at the table.

For a desk or a dressing table

• Gravity – Micro Vase — the smallest thing in the range. One stem, and it changes a windowsill.
• Roma – Bookmark — Nolli’s 1736 map of Rome in brass. For the reader who has run out of receipts to use.
• Cloud – Desk Tidy — solid brass, two overlapping dot grids that shimmer as you pass. Ships flat and folds into shape in twenty seconds.

When it needs to be the whole present

• Rainbow – Angle Vase — cut crystal built around a single stem, which is the point: it is a vase for one flower, not for an arrangement.
• Rainbow – Bowl — the same crystal at bowl scale, on a table where it will get looked at.
• Drops – Candelabra — four crystal spheres in a solid block, bonded so a shift of colour shows at each joint.

One piece of advice

If you do not know her taste well, buy small and buy brass. The bookmarks and the desk pieces are the ones people keep for a decade, because they are useful before they are decorative, and nobody has to find a place to put them.

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