Beautiful Basics

43 essential items for a happy home

Photo by Andreeew Hoang on Unsplash

I started working on a list of my Beautiful Basics a while ago because I often get asked questions like which water filter do I recommend? Or what are the safest non-stick saucepans? Or even, where do I get my white washing-up gloves from (oh, yes, stylistic game changer, Kelly Hoppen told me about these). It therefore seemed like a jolly good idea to pull my top picks all together into one single list.

What governed what made the cut? Form, function and simplicity. For example, I can’t bear tapered planters for house plants (or tapered waste bins), when you can have lovely simple cylindrical ones. Same with white porcelain mugs, and vases. Nice and straight does the job. Other things are because I wish to encourage you to purge the plastic at every turn. But it’s not about compelling you to buy extra stuff, these are the sort of items that once you have them, you never need to purchase them again, except perhaps to replace like for like.

So here’s the list... Beautiful Basics for the Happy Home. There’s 38 things on it as it stands, and it’s on Amazon because love or loathe the behemoth, it’s a competitive one-stop marketplace with fast delivery, and sometimes that’s just what you need. So I capitulated to its convenience. Just don’t buy someone a gift from here (unless it’s a water filter!)

To be utterly transparent as well, I have created this as an Amazon Affiliate, so I might get a degree of commission from qualifying purchases. I’ve no idea how much, but it’s at no extra cost to you. And crucially, I either own already and use on a daily basis everything listed, or would authentically recommend any item having tried and tested them, seen them elsewhere, or done the research to ensure the quality is what I’d expect — I do the work so that you don’t have to.

The idea is for everything I do to make life easier (happier and healthier) for you!

Beautiful Basics for the Happy Home

As I find more worthy items, I’ll add them to the list, but I’m quite excited by the idea that there may never be more than 50. There really are only so many basic items that we actually need. Once you have your starter set of white porcelain dinnerware, of course you can add in pretty platters in other colours if you so desire for a special occasion, but you don’t have to. To be honest, for such extras, I’d hit your locals anyway, these sort of things need to be chosen in person.

However I’m already thinking I’ll need to do another more general non-Amazon list featuring items like my favourite dining chairs (Ercol Model 608, you can often pick these up secondhand), bath mats (the Armande mat from The White Company) or diary (The Circle Planner) to cosy socks (Catherine Tough). Would you like to see that list too?