Standout Christmas gifts with stories to tell

SINGAPORE – This Christmas, consider gifts with strong design narratives and origin stories that spark conversations about the intersection of art and design.

These include British engineer Laurence Dickie’s biomorphic Vivid Audio speakers for audiophiles, Flutter plates from Japanese glassmaker Sugahara for homemakers and Vitra Design Museum miniatures for design enthusiasts.

Gifting or owning limited-edition pieces is also trending worldwide.

Global market intelligence firm Straits Research says the gifts, novelty and souvenir market worldwide was valued at US$13.8 billion (S$17.8 billion) in 2024 and is expected to reach US$19.4 billion by 2033.

In its 2025 report, it found that shoppers are going for more small-batch, handmade products due to the desire for authentic, shareable and personalised experiences in an increasingly digital world where mass-produced goods flood markets faster than ever.

The rise of travel and cultural appreciation in a post-pandemic world has also rejuvenated demand for niche gifts and keepsakes.

Book lovers will love a new tome by architectural conservator Yeo Kang Shua, who invites readers to take note of nuances in Chinese architecture in his tome, Honourable Mansion: The Invisible Hands Behind Singapore’s Last Traditional Teochew House.

Beyond the Chinese world, the book highlights how migrant communities express identity through the built environment and adapting to new contexts.

“By focusing on one Teochew house, it reveals how meaning arises from specific choices in design, ornament and craft,” says Prof Yeo.

“This approach shows that Chinese architecture is diverse, with traditions from other dialect groups, such as Hokkien and Cantonese, offering their own unique expressions. Understanding one sharpens appreciation of others.”

The Straits Times zooms in on six Christmas ideas for festive giving.

For the audiophile

Sound quality that stays ahead of the curve

British loudspeaker engineer Laurence Dickie says loudspeaker design should never be boxed in.

“I see loudspeakers mimicking nature – looking sculptural – rather than having the unnaturally angular silhouette of a box,” he tells The Straits Times in a recent interview at the Henderson Road showroom of X Audio.

The advanced audio-visual systems specialist is the sole distributor in Singapore of Mr Dickie’s Vivid Audio range of high-end speaker systems.

X Audio, helmed by Singaporeans Swee Dong Chang and Ryan Ng, represents some of the finest brands in the audio systems industry.

The home-grown company also distributes high-end Japanese audio brands, such as Phasemation, TAOC and Acrolink, and global names such as Lansche and Mola Mola.

Most high-end speakers sought after by audiophiles can cost from about $40,000 to more than $500,000 in Singapore.

Mr Dickie co-founded Vivid Audio in 2001 with South African partner Philip Guttentag, with Mr Dickie helming the engineering division.

This was shortly after he had designed one of the world’s most iconic speakers, the Nautilus, while working as a sound engineer at British audio giant Bowers & Wilkins for a decade from the 1980s.

From around 1988 to 1993, he led Project Nautilus for Bower & Wilkins, abandoning conventional wisdom at the time of box-shaped speakers in favour of biomimicry of the nautilus, a marine cephalopod with a fluid, snail-like form.

Before joining Bowers & Wilkins, he was already a science-driven tinkerer who treated audio as a serious hobby on top of a formal electronics education.

He developed a love of sound engineering from a young age from his father, who had costly Tannoy speakers in the family home in Derbyshire, England

“My father sowed the seeds of my early childhood fascination with engineering – from electronic design to sound reproduction,” says Mr Dickie, who has an electronics degree from Southampton University, which he found highly theoretical compared to his own hands‑on approach.

After setting up his own company in 2001, based in West Sussex, UK, and with its manufacturing facility in Durban, South Africa, Mr Dickie and his business partner introduced Vivid’s first speakers in 2004.

The speakers evolved into today’s Giya and Kaya ranges, which apply Mr Dickie’s signature designs – tapered internal tubes, lightweight but rigid cabinets or shells, and proprietary metal drivers – to more living-room-friendly, sculptural forms.

The drivers used in a speaker system make up the most crucial element, such as aluminium alloy for the diaphragms that help produce superior sound quality. A diaphragm is the thin surface of the driver that moves air to create sound.

Mr Dickie says this material significantly impacts the speaker’s performance and sound signature, particularly at higher frequencies.

From the 2000s, he began to dive deeper into the design of speaker systems centred on curves, such as his teardrop-shaped Giya range, released in 2008, and his more recent Kaya range, released in 2018.

“The best sound from a Vivid Audio speaker starts with a vinyl record or a compact disc, and you can even get a very big sound from a digital source such as a high-quality audio file,” he adds.

“As an engineer, I’m always looking for ways and means to improve audio quality and reduce distortion, such as including copper caps in the drivers of the speakers.

“Materials such as the fibreglass cabinetry make you go gaga over the bass, while copper caps help you hear the nuances of a song, such as the singer’s emotion, because the material adds clarity to the sound.”

Info: Vivid Audio’s Kaya S12 range is priced from $8,000 at X Audio at 06-13/14 Apex@Henderson, 201 Henderson Road. Viewing is by appointment only; call or WhatsApp 9180-0293.

For the bookworm

A tome on a Teochew towkay’s storied mansion

In architectural conservator and educator Yeo Kang Shua’s latest book about architectural heritage, Honourable Mansion: The Invisible Hands Behind Singapore’s Last Traditional Teochew House, he invites readers to see the book’s subject as more than just a case study of a single house.

Prof Yeo wants readers to see the House of Tan Yeok Nee at 101 Penang Road, a national monument, as an architectural palimpsest. Its layered identity, built up since the early 1880s, offers a powerful link to the values and craftsmanship of the early Chinese communities that ventured to South-east Asia.

He tells an intriguing story about the house, the last of four grand courtyard mansions built in Singapore by Teochew towkays in the 1800s.

The 348-page tome features more than 80 colour plates and post-restoration photographs by architectural photographer Darren Soh, alongside archival photographs, maps and illustrations dating back to 1906.

It is published by the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a global non-governmental organisation of heritage professionals dedicated to conserving and protecting cultural heritage sites globally.

In 2022, the house underwent an extensive restoration by its new owner, the Karim Family Foundation, at an estimated cost of more than $100 million over almost four years.

The architectural conservation works, which included pre-restoration studies, were carried out by a team from home-grown practice DP Architects who worked closely with Prof Yeo and about 30 traditional craftsmen from the Chaoshan region in China, the birthplace and cultural heartland of Teochew identity.

Prof Yeo distils nearly five years of research in the book, starting from early 2021, when he was commissioned to conduct feasibility studies for the Karim Family Foundation before the family bought the property the following year.

Sought after as an authority on traditional Chinese architecture, Prof Yeo also wrote Divine Custody: A History Of Singapore’s Oldest Teochew Temple, an architectural and historical study published by NUS Press in 2021 of Singapore’s 200-year-old Wak Hai Cheng Bio temple in Phillip Street.

Info: The book retails at $80.33 at Books Kinokuniya and Basheer Graphic Books. It is also available online at Epigram (

epigram.sg

) and Pagesetters (

pagesetters.sg

).

For the homemaker

A plate to set hearts aflutter

The Flutter Plate at Huls Gallery in Millenia Walk is a mesmerising glass creation named not only to set hearts aflutter during Christmas, but also to highlight its delicate construction.

Available in clear glass or carbon black hues, it is made in Japan by Sugahara Glassworks, one of the nation’s top glassmakers.

Founded in 1932 in Chiba, Sugahara is known for elevating everyday glassware into quietly poetic objects, and its works can be found in Huls Gallery, which showcases fine crafts from around Japan.

Sugahara’s artisans work entirely by hand, favouring clear and softly tinted glass that shows off both the fluidity of the material and the small, unexpected variations that signal something made, not manufactured.

The Flutter Plate sits in that tradition. Its light, fluttering form is created using steam to expand molten glass, which is then opened up by centrifugal force and left for gravity to decide its final curve.

Each plate settles into its own silhouette, so no two pieces are alike.

Info: The Flutter Plate (21cm wide and 6.5cm high) retails for $225. It is available at Huls Gallery, 01-36/37 Millenia Walk. For a range of fine crafts from Japan, visit the Duxton Hill flagship and 292 Joo Chiat Road store, or go to the online store at

huls.com.sg

For the design enthusiast

Miniature furniture from Vitra Design Museum

Architects, designers and students will love the range of miniatures of classic European furniture designs in the Vitra Design Museum’s Miniatures Collection, dating from 1820 to 2011.

The collection at W Atelier’s Henderson Road showroom features a range of designs, such as the Miniature Vegetal Chair by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec ($300) and a Miniature Lounge Chair and Ottoman by Eames ($1,390).

Each replica is meticulously reproduced on a 1:6 scale, allowing every curve of an Eames Lounge Chair or Panton Chair to be faithfully copied, down to wood grain and screws, so collectors feel like they own a piece of design history.

It all started in 1992 when the Vitra Design Museum started issuing miniature replicas of famous furniture from its collection.

The museum in Germany is home to one of the world’s most important furniture collections, with more than 7,000 chairs and tables and over 1,000 lamps under one roof.

It also looks after the archives and personal estates of design legends such as Charles and Ray Eames, Verner Panton and Alexander Girard, making it a kind of global vault for modern furniture design.

Taken together, the miniatures trace industrial furniture design from 19th-century Historicism to the Art Nouveau movement from 1820 to 1910; to the Bauhaus and New Objectivity phase (1919 to 1933); all the way to the modern designs of the 2000s.

Info: Visit W Atelier at 01-04, 211 Henderson Road, or go to the online store at

watelier.com

For the art lover

Hermes tableware made with artist Nigel Peake

French luxury design house Hermes has collaborated with Irish artist Nigel Peake on a line of tableware built around coloured geometric borders that riff on musical rhythm.

The 33-piece kaolin-white porcelain collection is called En Contrepoint, French for “in counterpoint”, alluding to a musical score, where two or more melodies run together, independent but in harmony with one another.

For the 2025 collection, the artistic directors of Hermes Maison – Ms Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Mr Alexis Fabry – turned again to Peake. They had collaborated with him in 2018 on a tableware ensemble called A Walk In The Garden, inspired by an English garden.

Peake, a keen vinyl collector, began drawing slim bands of watercolour that hinted at scale, tempo and rhythm, and which were improvised to form the heart of En Contrepoint.​

The range runs from bread-and-butter and dinner plates to bowls, mugs, tea and coffee cups, a minimalist teapot, trays, salad bowls and platters. All share the same light, graphic language of colours against pure white porcelain.​

Each design features a border with a different “beat” – eye-catching friezes made up of circles, squares and diamonds, painted by hand in around 30 shades of pink, violet, blue, green and orange.

Laid out on the table, the pieces invite a kind of colour‑matching game.

Borders collide with or echo one another – pink is paired with green, and yellow contrasts with blue. This allows the host to “compose” a new arrangement each time, like shuffling notes in a score rather than laying out a rigid, matching set for the table.

Info: Hermes’ En Contrepoint line is priced from $175 for a dish for soya sauce to $2,200 for a teapot. It is available at Hermes’ physical stores or online at

hermes.com/sg

For the heritage buff

Prints of Singapore shophouses from Karenmade

Designer, photographer and author Karen Fernandez loves shophouse facades, but resists prettifying her subjects.

The founder of award-winning online store Karenmade shoots a Shophouse Series that treats them as memory-keepers rather than just pretty shells.

In Little India, Jalan Besar and the back lanes of Chinatown, she leaves cracked window panes, peeling paint and stained tiles as they are, eschewing digital facelifts.

“I try to stay true to the conditions of the shophouses that I capture,” says Fernandez, whose webstore has won Expat Living magazine’s Readers’ Choice Awards for Best Gifts for three years running since 2023.

“I’ve been asked why I don’t fix the imperfections, given today’s photo-editing and AI tools. I simply reply that I don’t want to,” she adds. “To me, that is what makes them authentic, honest and full of character.”

As a child, shophouses were part of her daily routine. She recalls darting in and out of dim, cavernous provision shops where shopkeepers somehow knew exactly where every tin of biscuits or stack of pails was stashed.

Those everyday facades – from across her childhood home in Katong to the spice shops her aunt frequented in Little India – became special only after she moved overseas in 1990 and realised how distinctively Singaporean they were.

For Christmas, she says, a shophouse print is the sort of gift that outlasts the season. Her archival-grade, acid-free canvases are produced with local printers on heavyweight canvas and stretched over sustainable wood frames, made to retain their colour and form for decades.

Info: The Karenmade Shophouse Series starts at $180 for a canvas print measuring 50cm in length and 28cm in height. Order one at

karenmadesingapore.com

or e-mail Ms Fernandez at

karenmadesingapore@gmail.com

for bespoke sizes.