Gift guides
Housewarming gifts under £50 that don’t feel cheap.
Nine gifts under fifty quid with proper provenance — single-farm oil, a Welsh-mill blanket sample, a hand-bound notebook. The trick is knowing where to look.
The hard band of gift-giving is £25 to £50. Below £25 you have permission to be modest — a nice candle, a bottle of wine, a card. Above £75 you have permission to be generous — a throw, a piece of art, a real thing. The middle band is the one where most housewarming gifts live and most of them are bad: too cheap to feel considered, too expensive to feel casual. The supermarket end of John Lewis. The boxed-set candle-and-soap-and-hand-cream that costs £38 and looks like it cost £12.
The trick to giving well in this band is to skip the gift sets and buy small from someone serious. A bottle of single-estate olive oil from a Soho importer is £22 and feels like a gift twice that. A sample-yardage Welsh blanket from a working mill is £48 and is, in physical terms, a piece of cloth that a flagship store sells for £180. The list below is built on this: where the £50 budget gets you the proper version of a thing, not the John Lewis approximation.
1. A bottle of single-estate olive oil.
The cheapest gift on this list that punches the highest. Belazu sells single-estate Italian and Greek bottles around £18–£25; Odysea in Stoke Newington does Cretan single-estate at the same point. The thing to know is that supermarket extra-virgin is, with a few exceptions, blended industrial oil with a co-op label. The single-estate stuff tastes peppery and grassy and bears no relation to it. A small handwritten card — this is the one to finish things with, not cook with — is the difference between a bottle of oil and a gift. Most people who do not already buy good oil do not know there are two kinds.
2. A hand-bound notebook in something serious.
Skip the £38 leather-effect notebook from the gift shop. Stálogy from Japan does an Editor’s Series notebook around £22 with thin Tomoe River paper that is, by some margin, the nicest paper you can put on a desk for under £30. Choosing Keeping in Covent Garden imports beautiful French and Italian stationery and stocks bound notebooks in the £30–£48 band. Smythson sit just above the budget at £55 for a small Panama, but their pocket Wafer notebooks slide in at £48. A notebook is the rare gift that is both perfectly useful and never urgent.
3. A walking book routed from their front door.
This is the one I make and sell, so apply the bias warning. The reason it’s on this list is that £39 is the price-band sweet spot for a personalised gift — an A5 paperback, perfect-bound, with the recipient’s name on the cover and ten walks drawn fresh from their address. The book exists exactly because the next step up — a custom OS map print, framed — runs to £90, and the next step down — a generic Walks in Yorkshire paperback — is £9.99 and useless to someone who’s just moved.
It works for a recipient who has just moved into a village, or anyone who wants to walk from their house and doesn’t yet know what is over the hedge. Try it on their postcode — the demo is free and you can see the cover and the first walk before paying. Refund if the address can’t support three real walks.
4. A Welsh blanket throw — the small one.
The full-size Melin Tregwynt throw is £120; the half-size lap blanket is £48 and is the same cloth, woven on the same looms in Pembrokeshire, in the same patterns. Look in their lap-blanket collection. Tweedmill in Denbighshire have small lambswool throws around £38. The thing to know is that the small one is enough; nobody owns a stack of these, and the second blanket on the sofa — the small one folded over the arm — is the one that gets used the most.
5. A custom-stencilled doormat.
Coir, surname only, no clever phrases. Eat My Mat and Coir Mats UK both do the standard 90×60 stencilled mat for around £35. The point of the rule about surname-only is that the household’s name on the doorstep is dignified; a slogan is wedding-favours-via-Etsy, and you only need to make that mistake once. Coir takes a decade of weather; the gift outlives most of the soft furnishings in the house.
6. A bag of decent coffee, ground for them.
Two months of beans from a roaster they don’t already know is a kinder gift than the same money spent on one expensive bag from a roaster they do. Monmouth does a three-month subscription around £45; Square Mile in Bethnal Green is the slightly more nerdy alternative at the same price. Ask which grind they need before ordering — the wrong grind is the gift that goes in a drawer. Aeropress users say “medium-fine”, V60 users say “medium”, cafetière users say “coarse”.
7. A National Trust gift membership for a year.
I’m bending the budget here, but the under-50 alternative on the same theme is the English Heritage single membership at £65, or the Kew Gardens membership at £79. None of them are quite under £50, and the version that is — the Canal & River Trust “Friend” membership — sits at £42 a year and gives access to towpath events plus the slightly worthy feeling of supporting the canals. Pick the one that matches what they’ll actually use; for a country move, the Trust; for a London-stayer, Kew.
8. A pair of really good walking socks, multipack.
A single pair of merino socks is a depressing gift; four pairs is a generous one, and the maths still works under £50. Bridgedale in Northern Ireland make the Hike Midweight at around £15 a pair; Darn Tough from Vermont have a lifetime guarantee and run around £20 a pair. Four pairs of either lands at £50 or just below. The recipient who walks at all will be quietly thrilled; the recipient who doesn’t will quietly start. Sounds boring, isn’t.
9. A bottle of something good with a story.
If you’re going to do the bottle-of-wine cliche, do the version that earns its place. The Wine Society sells members-only bottles for non-members as gifts and has a small section of single-grower French wines around £28–£38. Bottle Apostle in east London will hand-pick a bottle in a price band if you ring the shop and explain. Cotswolds Distillery do their Signature gin and a single malt around £38–£45 if the recipient is a spirits drinker. The trick is the small note explaining why this bottle — this is from the village next to the one I grew up in; it’s the wine my dad opens when he wants to feel posh. The story turns £30 into a gift; the silence turns it into a bottle.
The principle.
The shape of a good gift under £50 is the small version of a serious thing, not the standard version of a frivolous thing. The single bottle of single-estate oil beats the gift-set of three. The lap blanket beats the boxed scarf. The four pairs of socks beat the slipper-sock-and-hot-water-bottle hamper. The principle is that the recipient should be able to look at the gift and locate the maker on a map, or the farm, or the mill. That’s the trick. That’s the difference between £38 well spent and £38 spent on something that a charity shop will reject in March.
If you only have £25 to spend, the oil is the answer. If you have £50, the walking book or the small Welsh blanket. If the recipient is a definite walker, the four pairs of socks. The only thing on this list I would never buy is the multi-thing gift set; the only thing not on this list that I would absolutely never buy is the £38 candle.
A note on the third gift on this list
The walking book is the one I make.
If you’d like to see what it looks like for the recipient’s postcode, type their address into the demo on the homepage. The book draws ten walks fresh, in about a minute, and you see the cover before paying. £39, posted within seven working days, with a full refund if the address can’t support three real walks.