New Home & Housewarming Gifts

Most housewarming presents are things for the house. Candles, a set of good glasses, and a throw for the back of the couch. All of it perfectly nice, all of it used, and all of it interchangeable, in that the same gift would suit anybody who had just moved into anywhere. A photograph of a place that actually matters to the person is doing something else. The townland they grew up in, the bay where they got engaged, the county they've just left behind for the new job. That's a present that says you know them, not simply that you know their new address.

I photograph the Irish landscape for a living, and the way I'd go about choosing one of these as a gift is to think about the place first and the picture second. Start with the stretch of coast or the mountain that means something to the person you're buying for, and only then work out which image of it you like best. You're not looking for something decorative - you're looking for somewhere in particular, and you already know where.

The traditional Irish new home gift

Go back far enough and the gift you brought to a new house carried a wish with it. A St Brigid's cross, hung up over the door to protect the place, is the one that's still widely known and still made every spring - it stands for protection for the house and the people under its roof.

A photograph of a place the person loves is doing the same job. It puts a bit of where they come from, or a place they keep going back to, up on the wall of a house they've only just started living in.

Start with the place, not the picture

Begin with the person and let the place narrow things down for you. Their home county, the coast they grew up beside, the mountain they can see from their parents' kitchen window, and the beach they walked every Sunday. You already know all of that about them, which is the whole advantage you have over anybody browsing for a generic bit of wall art.

The three photographs on this page are the kind of thing I mean - the Gap of Dunloe for someone reared in Kerry, Lough Tay for a Dubliner who spent their weekends in the Wicklow hills, Malin Head for anyone with Donegal in them. The catalogue is organised by county to make that easy: Kerry, Cork, Donegal, Wicklow, Galway, and the rest are all gathered on the Ireland by County page. And if the person you're buying for has moved abroad rather than across the country, a photograph of home means more when they can't drive out and look at it whenever they feel like it. Prints ship worldwide.

If you'd rather they chose

Choosing art for somebody else's walls is a judgement call - and not everybody wants to make that call on another person's behalf. There's no shame in that at all. Somebody who has just moved in often doesn't know yet which wall needs something on it, or how big that something needs to be, and those questions answer themselves after a few weeks of living in the place. A gift card leaves the choosing to them: they pick the photograph, the size, and the format in their own time, once they know their walls.

The practical bits

Every print is made to order, so allow two to three weeks from the day you order to the day it arrives. Each photograph is available as a framed print, on canvas, or as an acrylic print, and which of those suits is down to the room and the person's own taste. I check everything against my specifications before it ships, and if it arrives damaged I'll replace it at no cost to you.

If you know the place but you're stuck between two photographs of it, or you're not sure what size suits, drop me a line through the contact page and I'll happily talk it through with you.

More gift ideas and wall art: Wedding Gifts · First Anniversary Gifts · Retirement Gifts · Irish Wall Art · Canvas Prints of Ireland · Acrylic Prints of Ireland · Framed Prints of Ireland · Pictures of Ireland

Cheers,
Peter