People who love design are hard to buy for, because they notice everything. The safe route is to give them something a museum has already vetted.
Museum design shops do an unusual job: they sell the same objects that sit in the galleries upstairs. The Juicy Salif, the Ball Clock and the Bauhaus lamp are all in museum collections, and all of them are still in production.
We picked 14 things from 5 museum shops and sorted them by size of gesture, from a stocking filler to the kind of present that gets its own shelf. Where a designer or a date is given, it comes from the shop's product page or from the standard design histories.
Ten pocket notebooks, each in a different Pantone colour, packed in a slipcase. They are small, about 4 by 6 inches, with dot-grid pages. The kind of gift that gets split up and handed around a studio, which is a compliment.
Six coasters in beech veneer and cork, designed by the studio Bower, printed with geometric patterns that read as three-dimensional. Pushed together they make a trivet. Useful, flat, easy to post.
An embossing label maker of the old click-wheel kind: turn the wheel to a letter, squeeze, repeat. It comes with one roll of black tape, and refills are sold separately. Completely unnecessary and used constantly.
Craighill's scissors in cast stainless steel, 8.5 inches long, with the finger rings dipped in red, yellow and blue. A desk tool that someone clearly enjoyed designing. A good answer to the question of what to give the person who already owns good scissors.
Each of these is a named design with a history, and none of them costs as much as you would guess.
The small Braun alarm clock, in the tradition of Dieter Rams: a square white case under four inches across, black numerals and a yellow second hand. The alarm starts quietly and builds, and the snooze bar also lights the dial. Takes one AA battery, which is not included.
Alessandro Mendini's corkscrew for Alessi, the one shaped like a woman in a long dress whose arms rise as the screw goes in. It has been making people smile at dinner tables since the 1990s. Chrome-plated metal and resin, about 9.5 inches tall.
Philippe Starck's citrus squeezer for Alessi, a polished aluminium form on three long legs, tall enough to put a glass underneath. Whether it is a good juicer has been argued about for decades. Nobody argues about whether it is a good object.
Charles and Ray Eames designed a plywood elephant in 1945 that never went into production. This is the small plastic version, about 15 inches long, in matte dyed-through polypropylene. Sold as a toy, kept by adults.
Two small oak birds by the Danish designer Kay Bojesen, one in natural oak and one smoked, each 3.5 inches tall, made to stand beak to beak. A classic Danish wedding or anniversary present.
George Carwardine's 1935 spring-balanced lamp, the ancestor of nearly every adjustable desk lamp since, at two thirds of its original size. Cast iron base, aluminium arms, and a reach of about 30 inches. It comes with a bulb. Check the plug suits the recipient's country before ordering abroad.
The Eames coat rack: a white welded-steel frame with solid wood balls in several colours, made by Herman Miller. It was designed in 1953 to get children to hang things up. About 20 inches wide, with wall fixings included.
The George Nelson Ball Clock, first made in the late 1940s and produced by Vitra since 1999: twelve wooden balls on metal spokes, 13 inches across. It runs on a quartz movement, and the battery is in the box. One of the most recognisable wall clocks of the last century.
A piece of American folk art stood in the Eames House in Pacific Palisades for more than fifty years and turns up in many of the Eameses' photographs. This is Vitra's reproduction in dark oiled walnut on steel wire legs, about 11 inches long. It does nothing at all, and people who love design tend to want one.
Wilhelm Wagenfeld's 1924 table lamp, the object most people picture when they hear the word Bauhaus: a clear glass base and stem with a hand-blown opal glass dome, 36 cm tall. This is the licensed edition made by Tecnolumen. The price shown is in Danish kroner.
We read the public catalogs of the museum shops. Nobody paid to be on this list, and no brand sent us samples: we have not handled these items ourselves. Sizes and materials come from each shop's own product page, which is also where you buy.
Prices can change and items sell out. When a pick is no longer listed by its shop, it drops off this page.
For more, browse Home & Kitchen from every museum shop, or go straight to the Cooper Hewitt shop and the SFMOMA shop.