FROM A GARDEN CITY TO YOUR WINDOWSILL

WRITTEN BY ANORNAMENT'S CARVER

Welwyn Garden City is England's second garden city, laid out in the 1920s by Ebenezer Howard around a simple idea: that a town could be built with intention. Tree-lined streets, room to breathe, nothing thrown up in a hurry. Almost a hundred years later, I still think about that idea most days, usually with a chisel in my hand.

anornament started small, and it has stayed small on purpose. There was no factory, no production line, no team of machines waiting to be switched on. There was a kitchen table, a block of wood, and a slow evening spent working out how to make a dog's ears sit right. That is still, more or less, how every piece begins.

Why staying small matters more than it sounds

It would be easy to say "handmade" and leave it there, but the truth is more specific than that word usually gets to be. When a shop stays small, every piece that leaves it has actually been touched, shaped, and looked over by a real person, not a machine running a template a thousand times. It means a flaw in the wood gets noticed and worked around rather than shipped out anyway. It means the shop can say yes to a strange, particular request, a dog with one ear that never quite stood up, a cat with a torn ear from years of scrapping, because there is no production line telling us that's too much bother.

Being based in Hertfordshire rather than anywhere grander is part of the same choice. This is a quiet county, good for making things slowly, close enough to London to matter but far enough from it to think. There is something fitting about a town built to prove that a place could be planned with care, being home to a shop trying to prove that a keepsake can be made the same way.

A young shop, and no apology for it

We are still young. If you have found anornament recently, you may be one of the first people to hold one of these pieces, and that is worth saying honestly rather than dressing up. We would rather grow slowly and stay honest about what we are than grow quickly and lose the hand in it. Every review, every message, every piece that finds its way onto a shelf somewhere helps this stay a real, working, small English shop rather than becoming something else.

If that is the kind of thing you want sitting on your windowsill, a piece with a place and a pair of hands behind it, you are exactly who this was made for.

You can see the full collection here, carved and painted in Hertfordshire, one piece at a time.