Holiday Gift Guide

Heartfelt Gifts

Making a list and checking it twice can tire even the most festive of us. To ensure holiday shopping remains a merry affair, we encourage you to begin the sourcing process with a quiet moment of consideration. Pour a glass of your favorite beverage, curl up under a blanket with a notebook, and think about your giftees: What do they love to do? Where do they go, within their home, to relax? What word encapsulates their character? By making a list less about objects and more about personality, you’ll be better equipped to wade through the wonderland of gifts in local stores. For us, the following items remind us of friends and family—the activities they adore, their distinctive style, their joie de vivre. May these prompts help guide your person-to-present matchmaking experience at 22 Home.

For the cuddler…

We have scoured the market for the most tactically-enticing blankets from around the world, such as our selection of alpaca-and-wool-blend boucle throws from Belgium. Following traditional weaving techniques, Kurlisuri creates heavyweight textiles as sumptuous as they are toasty. Closer to home, Alicia Adams Alpaca produces a luxurious line of cable knit throws from the rare fiber shorn from the more than 200 Suri alpacas the Adams family has raised on their Hudson Valley farm in upstate New York. Sale of the throws, woven in the US and in Peru, support the family business’s commitment to sustainable agrarian and artisan practices.

For the sentimentalist…

“Memories are often triggered by smells.” This is the credo of Julien Pruvost, Creative Director of Cire Trudon, the iconic French candlemaker. Scents bypass the thalamus (the middleman for signaling action and other senses), instead beelining for the brain's olfactory bulb and triggering its links with the amygdala and the hippocampus, hubs of emotion and memory, respectively. Hence our sense of smell as spark for memory recall and intense emotion. This is the conduit Cire Trudon has explored since its founding in 1643. Over the course of its illustrious history, the artisan producer has made candles and fragrances for many luminaries including the royal court of Louis XIV.

For the entertainer…

Ceramic artists Ivan Pericoli and Benoît Astier de Villatte make each piece of their eponymous line by hand in their Bastille workshop according to the centuries-old technique (that Benoît learned from his father) of starting with black terracotta, sculpting forms inspired by 17th and 18th century designs, and finishing each piece with a milky glaze that accentuates the clay’s layered luminosity. As such, their vases and platters become the focal point of tablescapes, setting the highest bar for elegant functionally.

For those smitten with the West…

Utah native Owen Mortenson channels the raw beauty of the world around him into works of art he classifies under the self-styled brand, organic minimalism. A lifelong collector, he adventures outside to find the source material for his art: frizzy tumbleweeds, lone antlers, abandoned skulls, standout stones—all treasures to him. In his studio, he reimagines their forms into incandescent decorative objects—a gilded antler as centerpiece, teeming tumbleweeds as a chandelier.