15 Christmas gifts selected by Domus

Spanish brand dedicated to outdoor furniture, Diabla is part of Gandia Blasco and is available only online. Rechargeable with USB and dimmable, the portable table lamp Plisy is made of polypropylene and can be a brilliant extemporaneous solution for lighting outdoor environments: from dinners on the terrace to nights on the campsite. € 150.00

In his latest investigative documentary, Swedish director Fredrik Gertten explores the crisis of affordable housing in cities around the world, a poisoned result of gentrification but more generally of the drift of contemporary capitalism. Leilani Farha, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, is conducting the investigation into one of the greatest dramas of today's society.

Twenty-seven years worn very well for the timeless design by Enzo Mari produced by Danese. The beauty of Flores lies in the interlocking of the hinges that connect and move the two pieces of this stationery container, made entirely of polystyrene. Its rounded shapes and the choice of colours – seven – make it particularly versatile.

Two distinct forms of glass for base and diffuser, made of Murano glass by a master blower from NasonMoretti for the English studio specialized in lighting Cameron Peters Fine Lighting. The transparent glass diffuser, available in five colours, rests on the base in white satin blown glass. Nelly is a small table lamp very versatile and designed by two young Venetian designers Alberto Brogliato and Federico Traverso.
 

For those who don't know it, Lisa Corti's Home Textile Emporium is a Milan-based company that creates and designs fabrics – later produced in India – for a line of home furnishings and clothing for women and children. Coloured and resistant, American-style placemats are a practical and original complement to the table setting. They can be used as a single placemat, table center and underplate and are characterized by the practical and large diameter 38 cm) shiny washable surface. € 28.00.  

Cambridge Audio hadn't put a turntable on the market in years and, like all the products of the sophisticated British company, this Alva TT could only attract our attention. Minimal and technological as usual, it owes its name to Thomas Alva Edison (inventor, among other things, of the first phonograph) and, through the support of aptX HD Bluetooth, boasts the ability to play the re-lived vinyl records at 24-bit/48kHz.  

For some years now, the creative duo Pretziada has been engaging in a dialogue in Sardinia between the world of design and local craftsmen, collecting the teachings of tradition and reinterpreting them for a market that, constantly evolving, now looks very often to the past, to manual skills and the genius loci. Inspired by the so-called “Sulcitana“, an ancient model of the southwest of an island where everyone has their own knife, this version of the master Fronda has an aged juniper wood handle and, needless to say, is completely handmade.

Ini Archibong opened its own studio in 2010 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. It participated as a speaker in the 2018 edition of Design InDaba and is now hardly emerging. His story is rich: the son of Nigerian parents in the United States, he resides in Switzerland, in the United States and Singapore. His lamps from the Moriai per Sé collection bring out his attention to craftsmanship techniques. A precious gift that will not weigh little in Santa's pockets.  

Slug Night Lamp is a snail-shaped lamp for the night. Light can be controlled with the touch of the eyes. The lamp is provided of an automatic light-off function with a 15-minute delay, so you can gently fall asleep. The snail is made of ABS and silicone, that guarantee a soft touch.  

The “Palace” collection is designed by Alessandro Zambelli for Seletti and it’s a tribute to the Italian Reinassance. The tableware set brings four historical buildings – Palazzo Torrione, Palazzo della Signoria, Palazzo Borghese and Palazzo del Governo – on the table. The Italian palaces, made of modular pieces, can be “dismounted” and transformed in dishes, cups and bowls. Every piece is made of fine white porcelain and completed with details such as windows and columns.

The Shy Crescent designed by Paolo Metaldi is the indispensable aid for shredding vegetables with two ingenious tricks: the mobile handles allow you to use it with one or two hands and cover the blade to store it safely. A Compasso d'Oro in the kitchen...and green sauce for Christmas guaranteed!

A collection of linens that questions the way in which relationships are built in the age of the Internet, the volatility of the whole. It can also be read with irony though, and with the return to freer sex, after the dark years of fear of AIDS (which has not disappeared). Produced and conceived in Romania, it is obviously bought on the Internet.

This year Ikea teamed up with Sonos to launch its first wifi-connected lineup of home speakers, which is called Symfonisk – obviously, one of the simplest name ever for an Ikea product. So far, the Synfonisk family is composed of just two different models: the first one is a traditional, box-shaped speaker that you can place on a bookshelf or hang on the wall. The other one is a sort of HomePod crowned by a light, which can be also described as an Alexa-enabled table lamp that's capable of playing Spotify, control smart lights and more. It's the perfect bed-side smart device and a better antidote than Night Shift to rest your eyes from your smartphone. It's something innovative that push a bit further the smart speaker design and forecasts houses fully embedded with artificial intelligence and IoT. The speaker is covered in fabrics and there also buttons for old-styled touch control, but most importantly it's fully compatible with the Sonos ecosystem for connected audio. 179 euro.

Horizn Studios is a company from Berlin, founded back in 2015 with the precise aim to serve as the travel brand for the future – that's more or less our present. Bags, backpacks and luggage are designed for digital nomads and smart professionals who work on trains, in airports and cafeterias all over the world, and are constantly travelling. The design process involves using new, sustainable materials and the feedback of a strong community. M5 is a piece of cabin luggage with removable smart battery to charge your devices on-the-go, a 15" front pocket for laptop, tablets and documents, Japanese spinner wheels, a polycarbonate hard shell and more high-tech features. Recently the company has launched a Neon Edition and two M5 capsule collections, one is a collaboration with BMW, while the other celebrates NASA and the moon landing anniversary, co-designed by the teenage Alyssa Carson, the 17-year-old who's training to be the first human on Mars. From 350 euros.

Made of fragrant Hinoki wood, traditionally used in the construction of Japanese temples and coming from sustainable forests, the double stool invites you to a close seat and to share moments of sociality. Discover more.

Aamu Song and Johan Olin – aka Company – have recently opened a tiny shop in Helsinki where they sell unique items, which are the result of an exchange with some of the oldest craft realities in Europe. Such as the beautiful Sea matryoshka – seven “passages“ from whale to plankton – designed by Company and handmade in the Russian town of Semenov, the “capital” of matryohska dolls.

For the holidays I would like to propose two recently listened records that have particularly impressed me: the first is a live album of piano improvisations by American jazz musician Keith Jarreth, Munich 2016. An amazing concert with a poignant final tribute to singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (Answer Me, My Love). The other is the album Soliloquy by the Anglo-French singer and author Lou Doillon. A fascinating atmosphere and a dark, nocturnal and enveloping voice.

Umarell is a dialectal Italian word for those people – mostly old men – who stare at building sites. There is a yellow one over my desk at Domus. At first he was watching me, he didn’t approve of the chaos, neither my passion for Fonzies. Then he got used to it, he got bored, and now he stares somewhere else. “The hardest thing to do is to work hard when nobody is watching you: increase your productivity with your personal Umarell.” I recommend it to any architect and designer whose eyes shine when they discover a slit in the perimeter of a building site, from which to spy over. 3D printed, it costs 18 euros.

The history of the table clock that earned Richard Sapper his first Golden Compass in 1960 can be read here. If you have a budget of about 450 euros this design icon is a real treat for Christmas. Produced by Lorenz, it celebrates industrial design in its fundamental aspects: precision, synthesis, functionality and surprise.