Christmas trees

Choosing a pre-lit Christmas tree, or an unlit one

A pre-lit Christmas tree settles the hardest part of decorating before you begin, because the lights are already woven through the branches and spaced evenly from the trunk outwards. The gain is not only the hour saved untangling a string. A tree that arrives lit has no visible flex, no thin patch where the lights ran out three branches from the top, and nothing to work around when the decorations go on. Every full-size pre-lit tree we make is warm white rather than cool, which is a deliberate choice: warm light flatters glass, brass and dark green, and cool light flattens them.

An unlit tree is the more traditional choice, and the more flexible one. You choose the colour, the quantity and the character of the lights yourself, and you can change your mind next year without changing the tree. Our unlit Christmas trees run from six to eight feet.

The pre-lit range goes a foot further, to nine, and it includes a tabletop tree that runs on batteries rather than a cable, for a windowsill, a hall table or a room where no socket is free.

So the real question is how you like to decorate. If dressing a tree with lights is part of the pleasure, choose unlit. If you would rather begin with the decorations, choose pre-lit.

Sizing a Christmas tree to your room

Ceiling height decides the tree, and the rule is to leave room above it rather than fill the gap. Our design director, Fred, recommends a seven-foot tree for most homes with standard ceilings, a six-foot tree where the proportions are smaller, as in a cottage, and eight or nine feet where a room has real height to give. In centimetres, those are 180cm, 210cm, 240cm and 270cm, so measure floor to ceiling and take off enough for a topper to sit comfortably rather than press against the plaster.

Width is the measurement people forget, and it is the one that decides whether the room still works in December. Our trees widen as they grow taller: 130cm across at six feet, 150cm at seven, 165cm at eight and 175cm at nine. That is nearly 1.8 metres of floor at the largest size, before anything goes underneath it. Walk the route you take through the room every day, and make sure the tree is not standing in it.

If there is no floor to spare at all, the tabletop tree stands 46cm high and 36cm across, which is a windowsill, a console, or the corner of a kitchen table.

How our Christmas trees are made

The realism comes from the needles and the count. Every full-size tree in the collection is modelled on the Nordmann Fir, the dense, symmetrical species that has been a symbol of Christmas across Europe for generations, and the needles are a combination of PE and PVC rather than a single material, which is what gives the branches their variation instead of a uniform plastic sameness. The counts are the other half of it: 42 branches carrying 2,599 tips on the six-foot tree, rising to 90 branches and 6,335 tips at nine feet. That density is what lets a tree hold decorations out at the tips instead of letting them sink towards the trunk.

Each full-size tree arrives in sections with its own stand. The tabletop tree needs no assembly at all and comes ready to set down in a hand-woven wicker basket.