The Autumn Collection
Autumn is our favorite season, and we have never pretended to be neutral about it.
The light goes long and low, the way it does in that hand drawn flyover of Yosemite we could not stop watching last month. The house gets used again. You start wanting a lamp on at four in the afternoon and something warm to hold while the rain does its work on the window.
So this is what the shop looks like in September. Green first, because we are Moss and Fog and the moss is not going anywhere. Then the oranges arrive, in cast acrylic and embroidered thread and the particular blaze that only turns up this time of year.
We have to want to keep it ourselves. That is the test that disqualifies the most.
How things get into the shop
No. 01 · Light
Autumn is a lighting problem
before it is anything else
The sun clocks off at a reasonable hour now and the room needs a plan. These four are the ones we keep reaching for, from a lamp small enough to carry into a tent to a jar of matches that costs five dollars.
Mini Wireless Lamp
Lund London
Tap the silicone globe and it steps through eight colors, white through green, on about seven hours of charge. We like it for the places a proper lamp will not go: a tent, the top bunk, the floor of a hallway at two in the morning. Charges over USB C, and the cable is in the box.
$25
Rechargeable Candle Light
Phonar
Press once and it is a dimmable table lamp. Press twice and the light starts to wander the way a real flame does, low and amber with almost no blue in it. We took one camping and it did the thing a fire does, which is to give people a small circle to sit around.
$34
Safety Match Jars
Chandler Studio
Long matches in a corked apothecary jar with a strike pad on the side. A small thing that makes lighting a candle feel deliberate instead of frantic, and one of the better five dollar objects we know.
From $5
Glass Incense Holder
Botanica
Hand blown in soft milk and translucent glass, sized for a single stick and shaped like a pebble that got lucky. Jade or lavender. It catches the ash, which is the whole job, and looks good doing nothing.
$15
No. 02 · Senser Woodcraft
Wood that asks to be handled
Senser Woodcraft was founded in 2015 by three cousins from a woodworking family, with workshops now in China and New York. They sand past 800 grit, which is the sort of detail you feel before you know why. Nothing they make is identical to anything else they make, because the grain decides.
Sapele Balance Stones
Senser Woodcraft
Five stones that are not stones. Sapele has a ribbon grain that reads red brown in daylight and deepens as it ages, and there are magnets set inside, so a cairn can lean in ways a real one never would. There is a set on our desk that gets rebuilt several times a day by whoever is thinking.
$79
More Fingers Stand
Senser Woodcraft
An open hand cut from a single block of beech, with six fingers instead of five. The extra one came from the founder’s six year old niece, who wanted somewhere to put one more ring. It is a real jewelry stand and it is also a joke, and it holds both jobs well.
$64
No. 03 · Bath
Soap for the season
of long showers
Bell Mountain Naturals cut every bar by hand, which is why the terrazzo pattern never repeats. It is a small, cheap, genuinely nice thing to change in a house in October.
Terrazzo Gem Soap
Bell Mountain Naturals
Poured, cured and hand cut one bar at a time, so the terrazzo flecks land differently every time and no two are alike. Plant based oils and butters, always palm free. Five scents, and the sage and geranium is the autumn one.
$12
Terrazzo Gem Soap, Mini
Bell Mountain Naturals
The same bar at travel scale. It is the easiest thing in the shop to tuck into somebody else’s parcel, which is most of the reason we keep it in stock.
$7
No. 04 · The Reading Room
Books for the hours indoors
Autumn is when the Reading Room earns its keep. A new delivery landed this week, so there is more on the shelf than there was a fortnight ago. Every book parcel goes out with a letterpress bookmark we print ourselves, hand numbered in an edition of 250. If you like the tree ones, we also wrote about what trees do at night.
Rare Trees
The Reading Room
Sixty of the strangest and most threatened trees on earth, photographed properly. Sara Oldfield and Malin Rivers move between the botany and the people trying to keep these species alive, which is what lifts it above a picture book.
$40
Cabin Porn
The Reading Room
The book that came out of the website, and better than the website. Zach Klein’s collection of handmade shelters, photographed by Noah Kalina. It is the most flipped through book in our studio. Fair warning, it will make you price out land.
$40
Mushrooms, a Wooden Magnet Set
The Reading Room
Eight mushrooms cut from wood and printed in full color, morel through fly agaric, with a fold out poster and a small illustrated guide. The most autumn object in the shop by some distance.
$10.95
The Healing Nature of Trees
The Reading Room
A small green hardcover about slowing down among trees. Patrice Bouchardon turns an old idea into something you can actually do, with walking and breathing exercises and notes on reading the character of different species. Unhurried and a little mystical, and we mean that as a compliment.
$9.99
No. 05 · Draplin Design Co.
A little blaze orange
Every autumn we end up reaching for the same two patches. Aaron Draplin has been drawing thick, unmissable marks out of a Portland studio for two decades, and we collected these from him by hand, twenty seven pieces in all.
Way Out West Patch
Draplin Design Co.
Three words that have been pulling people across this country for two hundred years, in sunset stripes and heavy type. Iron on backing. It looks best on a jacket that has already earned a few miles.
$8.50
Soothing Sun Patch
Draplin Design Co.
A low, warm sun in concentric bands, the kind that turns up around seven in the evening in July and fixes most things. It reads even better in October, when you miss it.
$8.50
No. 06 · Natural Finds
What the woods handed over
Two things we did not design, manufacture or improve. One was gathered off the ground and one is still growing, which puts them at opposite ends of the shop and somehow in the same paragraph. The moss one connects to our piece on the foggiest place on earth, if you want the long version.
Giant Sequoia Pinecones
Moss & Fog
Real cones, gathered by hand, from among the largest living things on earth. Some sequoias pass three hundred feet and live for thousands of years, and the cone is the size of a chicken egg. That gap is the whole appeal.
$12
Pocket Terrarium
TERRART NYC
Living moss layered over lava sand and colored sand, sealed in glass under a cork. Handmade in New York. It is the one thing in the shop that is genuinely alive, and it asks almost nothing of you.
$11
How the shop chooses
We get asked this more than anything else. The answer is unglamorous. We have to be able to name who made it. It has to be good in the hand and not only in the photograph. And one of us has to want to keep it, which is the test that disqualifies the most.
There are around a hundred things in the shop and every one of them is there because somebody here argued for it. When a maker is small we say who they are. When something is ours, we say that too. You can see the whole autumn selection on our about page, or just go and have a look.
