Some things are just lovely to hold… a satisfying weight, a luscious texture, that indefinable air of being made with care and skill. We think this is one of life's great underrated pleasures…
Is there one of those German words for that peculiar pleasure of picking something up and immediately knowing it's been extremely well made?
Well, naturally, there is, or something close. Handschmeichler (literally a 'hand-flatterer') is a small object so pleasing to hold that you can't help turning it over in your fingers. Think of a beautiful fountain pen, a piece of pottery, a particularly useful pair of scissors, or a door handle with a reassuringly solid ‘clunking’ action. You pick it up and immediately think: Ooh, that's nice.
It is a deeply satisfying sensation: a mix of weight, balance, texture, and the way the different parts come together. Somehow, you can just feel that care has been taken.
And while we might not quite have a word for it, we think it's a sensation worth celebrating…
The joy of getting your hands on something
Good design is usually described in visual terms (shapes, colours, proportions and patterns), but we experience the world through our hands as well as our eyes. Some of the most satisfying qualities of an object can only be appreciated by touching it.
Take our Athena chandelier, for example. It's a glamorous creation, with dozens of solid glass rods arranged in a gleaming brass frame. But there’s another dimension to it, because when it arrives, you have to do a little bit of assembly work.
Before the chandelier is hung, you need to spend half an hour or so carefully threading the individual glass rods through the holes in the frame. One by one, you feel their weight and smoothness, see how beautifully they catch the light, and gradually watch the whole magnificent thing take shape.
It’s an extraordinarily satisfying experience. And afterwards, every time you look at your Athena, you have a special connection with it, because you know exactly what it's made of, how it fits together, and how lovely those materials feel. You might say that you’ve quite literally had a hand in making it.
A happy accident in solid brass
Another favourite example is our Trafalgar lamp, which began life in a rather unusual way.
One day, Pooky founder Rohan picked up an offcut of brass from the workshop floor. It was a chunky, satisfyingly solid piece of metal, not originally intended to be anything in particular, but something about its weight, shape and substance appealed to him.
In a moment of brilliance, he decided it could be lamp-ified. A few tweaks later, the Trafalgar was born. It's since become a Pooky classic, evolving into a whole family of table lamps, floor lamps and wall lights.
You might say this ‘mistake that worked’ is the opposite of the usual design process, in that instead of starting with an idea and choosing a material to make it from, Rohan started with a mysteriously appealing material and discovered the idea hiding within it. The pleasure of the stuff came first.
The human touch
Of course, substance isn't necessarily about weight. Sometimes the pleasure of a well-made object comes from the delicate skill involved in creating it.
Our handmade marbled paper lampshades are a case in point.
Paper marbling is a centuries-old craft, involving carefully dropping paints and oils onto thickened water, then gently raking and stretching them into extraordinary swirling patterns. A sheet of paper is laid onto the surface, picking up the design before being lifted away and dried.
The wonderful thing is that the results can never be precisely repeated. Every marbled sheet is different, and every finished lampshade is therefore a little work of art in its own right… And you have the profound pleasure of knowing that the beautiful pattern illuminating your sitting room came about through this combination of human skill and natural movement, and a bit of happy chance.
The deeper pleasure of things that last
There's another pleasure in a well-made object, to do with time.
You don’t generally replace a good lamp when you redecorate, instead it might move from the sitting room to the bedroom, wear a different shade, or find itself in an entirely new house. Over the years it becomes part of the furniture, in the fullest sense of the expression.
Because we live with and touch them every day, the quality of ordinary objects has a cumulative effect: the pleasure they give us builds up.
The best objects give us that immediate hit of pleasure when we first acquire them, but also a more profound pleasure over years of living with them. We come to appreciate their little details, their particular qualities, the thought and care that went into making them; and we get to know them, almost as old friends.
And the better made they are, the more there is to love.