Home for Christmas—gift inspo for where your heart is

Christmas is the perfect excuse to buy something for the home you’ve been thinking about—especially with sales times at their hottest around Christmas and New Year.

Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide

Christina and I made it a custom a while ago to buy the house a Christmas gift as well as things for each other. It’s usually something we’ve both been meaning to get but have never got round to it.

Or it’s something that’ll make our place look or smell nicer, or adds a bit of style or comfort to our favourite rooms. Or maybe something that’s just bloody cool.

These gift ideas for the home are part of our annual Hint Magazine guide to Christmas. It includes a shoppable section with all kinds of ideas for Christmas presents, but also has things like recipes, unusual Christmas movies and ways to personalise gifts to make them even more special.

Check out this year’s Hint Magazine here.

Christmas Gifts For Where Your Heart Is

Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide - Glasshouse Fragrances Festival of Lights Candle

Glasshouse Fragrances Festival of Lights Candle 380g

Turbo charge the Christmas feels for someone this year with this delicious smelling sugar and spice donut candle from Glasshouse Fragrances.

They can fill their house with rich aromas of cinnamon, cloves, apple pie and wild berries and really get into the festive mood. This Festival of Lights candle comes in a beautifully decorated tin illustrated by Michelle Pereira for an extra touch of Christmas.

$59.95 RRP

Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide - Wilson Payne Flock of Favourites and Aissie As tea towels

Wilson Payne Aussie Tea Towels

No Aussie kitchen is complete without one of these excellent tea towels! Each eco-friendly 100% cotton towel has been designed and manufactured in Australia by a combination of regular and special needs workers.

Both a good ‘dryer-upper’ and a work of art, these towels are the perfect gift for the house-proud or home-sick true blue Aussie.

Our picks of Wilson Payne’s Australiana Collection are the Flock of Favourites, featuring the likes of sulphur-crested cockatoos, kookaburras, lyrebirds and even the menacing cassowary, and the Aussie As.

This tea towel has all the icons that make Australia unique. Aussie inventions like the Hills Hoist, the Splayd and Ugg boots make their appearance, as do icons like the stubby holder, budgie smugglers, Akubras and box wine. Good on ya, cobba!

$33.95 RRP per towel

Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide - Shark Cordless Detect Pro pet friendly

Shark Cordless Detect Pro with Auto-Empty System

For the house-proud and lovers of tech, the Shark Cordless Detect Pro with its incredible Auto-Empty System is, well, Christmas!

Packed with features, functions and automations, it’s clear why Shark didn’t just want to label this masterpiece of engineering a mere vacuum cleaner.

For starters, this thing will empty itself every time you hang it up to charge. It comes with a bin that holds up to a month’s worth of debris, which also has a sensor to tell you when it’s full and anti-odour tech too. Compared to emptying a vacuum manually, this function hugely reduces dust and allergen contact.

Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide - Shark Cordless Detect Pro Auto Emptying System

The machine itself has four different automatic modes to help with different situations. Dirt Detect boosts power when it senses hidden dirt or encounters more debris than normal. Sensors on the side of the floor nozzle can tell when you’re near a wall in Edge Detect mode and gives a power boost to the suction and sweeping rollers, while Floor Detect knows when you’re going from a hard floor to carpet or  to a thick rug and will apply power appropriately.

Light Detect comes on when you’re cleaning under furniture or in low-light areas, illuminating the floor so you can see where the dirt is.

The handset is more like mission control, with a display that tells you everything from battery life to how clean an area is. LED rings show in real time how much debris is on the floor in three colours ranging from blue to red.

Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide - Shark Cordless Detect Pro pet friendly Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide - Shark Cordless Detect Pro Dirt Detect Mode

For me the most exciting thing is the self-cleaning brushroll function, which actively separates and removes long hairs from the floor roller. Christina’s long locks look great, but they’re a nightmare when you’re in charge of vacuuming.

There are so many other neat features to the Shark Cordless Detect Pro I haven’t mentioned that really pushes my gadget-geek buttons (things like how it hinges so you can get right under furniture), but you can see why I love this thing.

Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide - Shark Cordless Detect Pro flexible wand

You might not think this is the most romantic of Christmas gifts at first, but when anything that cuts down effort and time spent of house chores is pretty hot in our book!

$699.99 RRP (down from $999.99)

Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide - Lord & Lion Maharaja spice set

Lord & Lion Exotic Spices

Spoil the curry king or queen in your life with this exquisite spice box from Lord & Lion—a heritage brand trading in hard-to-find luxury spices from Sri Lanka and India. Founder Eresha De Zoysa is a Sydney local but her family has been in the spice and tea business in Sri Lanka for over 120 years.

This elegant hand-packaged Maharaja gift set comes with 12 essential spices for Indian style curries, each in its own black matte spice tin.

You’ll find the likes of smoky spicy Kashmiri chilli, aromatic and bitter amchur, umami-packed asafoetida and bright earthy turmeric inside as well as a bundle of high-grade Ceylon cinnamon quills, a gold spice spoon, a beautiful Lord & Lion tea towel and a set of five recipe cards.

Alternatively, there is the Lankan Spice Box, full of the treasured ingredients for many Sri Lankan specialties.

$99.00 RRP

Mr and Mrs Romance Hint Magazine Christmas gift guide - Lord & Lion Singapore chilli sauce

Lord & Lion Singapore Chilli Garlic Sauce

As well as spice blends and boxes, Lord & Lion create complete sauces like this Singapore Chilli Garlic Sauce. Perfect for seafood (we’re all thinking about mud crabs now, right?) but also as a dipping sauce, a stir fry sauce with veggies or even with a bit of mayonnaise to add a touch of creaminess.

Lord & Lion donate from their spice sales to help housing projects in rural Sri Lanka, helping with medical aid and housing the homeless, and supplying essential human needs like running water, electricity furniture and cooking equipment to poor communities.

$11.95 RRP

Christmas Wines for Yuletide - Coravin Sparkling

Coravin Sparkling

The ultimate gift for your Champagne hero who hates waste, the Coravin Sparkling keeps bubbly, well, bubbly for up to a month!

Put the tea spoons back in the drawer (that doesn’t work anyway) and throw those clamp stoppers away, this sleek, easy-to-use sparkling wine preserver is a game-changer. By injecting carbon dioxide through the cleverly engineered cap, the Coravin Sparkling re-pressurises the bottle maintaining the fizz and keeping the wine as fresh as the day you popped the cork for up to four weeks!

You can see our full review plus our month-long test of the Coravin Sparkling here.

It’s perfect for those of us who fancy a cheeky glass of sparkling but not a whole bottle, or for that spritz at the start of the night where you only need 30ml of bubbly.

$699.95 RRP

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