Choosing the right luxury hamper
Our luxury hampers are built around a simple idea: the treats are eaten over Christmas, but the pieces they arrive with stay in the kitchen, on the drinks tray or by the bath for years. Each one pairs food, drink or bath products from small British producers with pieces from our own collections, so choosing a Christmas hamper is really a matter of matching a daily ritual to the person who will open it.
For the tea drinker, there are loose leaf teas from Bath and buttery shortbread, served in ceramic cups and saucers with a matching milk jug. The coffee hamper swaps these for Cotswold-roasted coffee and biscotti, with espresso and cappuccino mugs and a solid oak scoop. Gin and red wine lovers receive a bottle from an English producer, two mouthblown glasses and something to eat alongside it, from olives in basil and garlic to dark chocolate and marcona almonds.
The baking hamper is for the person who is happiest with flour on the worktop: a wooden rolling pin and whisk, a stoneware mixing bowl and jelly mould, and vanilla, honey and cacao nibs to start the first bake. The spa hamper gathers our English Fig fragrance into a candle, a diffuser and a hand and body wash and lotion, with two flannels, a small dish and a white tea to finish the evening.
If you would rather pair a luxury hamper with a single present, our extra-special gifts and wider gifts collection are a good place to continue.
What goes into a Neptune hamper
Every one of our luxury hampers starts with the basket. It is woven and white-washed, then fastened with two leather straps and a traditional brass buckle, and it comes in two sizes depending on what it needs to hold. It is a basket made for keeping, not a box made for recycling.
Inside, the food and drink come from small British producers, several of them from the West Country close to our home in Wiltshire: tea from Bath, gin distilled in Bath, tonic made in Devon, olives prepared in Dorset and coffee roasted in the Cotswolds, alongside an English Pinot Noir and chocolate made in West Sussex.
The pieces packed with them come from our own kitchen, glassware and bathroom collections, designed with the same attention to detail we give our kitchen cabinetry. The gin and wine glasses are mouthblown in Poland and hand-finished with an optic twist. The baking bowls are stoneware, made by a ceramics studio in Portugal and finished with a hand-applied reactive glaze. None of it is a gift-set extra: these are the same pieces we sell on their own, chosen to be used every day once the last biscuit has gone, which is the part of a luxury hamper that keeps on giving.