Notes from the house.

On the case for a house gin.

A London Dry under our own mark started as a joke between two people who already drink too much gin. It survived three meetings, two label revisions, and one frankly humbling tasting because the brief kept getting shorter.

What we cut: juniper-forward swagger, citrus theatrics, a botanical list long enough to need a footnote. What we kept: a clear backbone, a touch of coriander seed, and the discipline to leave the rest alone. The bottle is heavy because we like the weight on a workbench, and the label is bone with bronze foil because we wanted it to read at arm's length in a low-lit room.

A house gin is a small claim. It says: this is what we drink, and this is what we'd pour you. If we got that right, the rest of the cellar follows.

A keyring is a small contract.

There's a particular weight a keyring should have. Too light and it slips off the bench unnoticed; too heavy and it wears a hole in the lining of every jacket you own. We spent longer on this than is reasonable.

Brass over steel because brass takes the patina of being used. Leather over silicone because leather looks like something rather than the absence of something. No laser-engraved sans-serif fonts, because the moment your keyring tries to be a logo you've lost the thread. The loop is a millimetre wider than every reference we could find, because every other loop we tried felt mean.

A keyring lives in your pocket for a decade. The least it can do is feel correct.

The desk as workbench.

The line between a desk and a workbench is artificial and getting more so. The same hands that answer email also fix things, and the same surface that holds a notebook also holds a wrench from time to time. We decided early that our desk objects and our garage objects should be made of the same materials, so that putting them next to each other felt deliberate rather than accidental.

Walnut because it ages well under hands. Brass because it doesn't pretend to be anything else. Cloth-bound notebooks because we like the way they open flat after a few months of use. A short defence, then, of treating your desk like a workbench: it will get better the more you use it.