Touch is a much underrated sense. Whether you’re a child in a toyshop or an adult in a china shop, or you’re in bed with your lover, the temptation to touch is too great to resist.
Retailers place the emphasis on the visual: we’re encouraged to look but not touch, and window displays are kept out of reach behind glass. Yet the tactile is fundamental to our full experience of the world around us. If you ask any architect where the money on a project should go, they will tell you that it’s worth investing in 1) the bare bones of the design and a good quality of construction and 2) the things you touch.
So, because you touch them everyday...
I don’t mean this in the way your dowager aunt might in dismissing anything designed after 1915. I mean furniture that is made with love and care. It is probably going to be expensive but it will reward you, I promise, in the fullness of time with a longer life and more use and somehow a livelier character, because you know it well and the factory it came from and maybe even the person who made it, thanks to a little brochure that came with the furniture that you may end up keeping as long as the furniture.
I think of every decently made object I’ve seen or picked up, from lamp posts and bridges to spoons and eggcups, as a physical embodiment of human energy: the magical ability of our species to take raw materials and turn them into things of use, value and beauty.
The action of something like a light switch should not only feel crisp and easy, it should feel the same way thousands of uses later. This is down to the quality of the components and the quality of the assembly. In the case of lighting, we’re used nowadays to being able to buy a bedside lamp for around £5 in a DIY store. But because it’s cheap, that doesn’t mean to say it’s disposable or planet-light. The environmental impact of lighting is heavy, because each fixture comprises many components from many materials that have travelled many thousands of miles before being assembled. The average bedside lamp might contain five separate types of plastic, a spun aluminium shade, brass and steel components, PVC cabling, copper wire, silicone gaskets, rubber sheathing, ceramic lampholder and fuse; and, in the bulb, rare gases, glass, tungsten or rare metal phosphors, mercury, electronic components and a circuit board.
So my advice is, whether you spend £5 or £300 on a table lamp, buy it with the intention of keeping it for ever. Don’t think of it as disposable, because in truth it isn’t. It will carry on having an effect on the planet and human health long after you’ve thrown it out.
They light up, they dispense water when you wave your hands in front of them, they disgorge water in all kinds of fancy ways, but there are only five important things about taps.
1. They shouldn’t wobble.
2. They shouldn’t fall apart or drip.
3. If there are indices, marked ‘Hot’ and ‘Cold’, they shouldn’t wear off.
4. The action and the surface should feel good.
5. They should be sustainably made. Engineering like this is energy intensive and for taps to be vaguely ecological they should be made from recycled brass, be recyclable, use closed-loop plating processes and be made in the country of consumption.
Bathing is a sensuous experience and even washing and shaving can be pleasures with the right materials around you. An acrylic bath may hold the heat longer than an enamelled-steel or cast-iron equivalent, but it just doesn’t feel as good. On the other hand, knowing that your bare flesh has been in contact with stone tiles quarried in some mine by underpaid, under-age labour in India or China can make you feel dirty rather than clean. The rule in researching surfaces and finishes for your home has to be ‘shop local’, in other words from within your country.
Really important because we don’t just touch them but also move our hands over them. Consequent...
