13 Best Housewarming Gifts for Any New Home | WIRED

Oct 31, 2024

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Shopping for someone else's house is intimidating. What do they not have yet that you can buy them? What's the most useful thing they'll definitely use instead of just adding to their shelf clutter?

There are a few easy classics that folks love to gift—who doesn't love a candle or another little houseplant?—but there are also a lot of really useful, beautiful gifts that you can gift instead. After living in eight different apartments in the past 10 years and buying my first home just a few months ago, here are the items that are getting daily use in my house.

WIRED's Gear team has personally tested and vetted everything that appears in our gift guides. Also be sure to check out gifts for outdoorsy people, book lovers, new parents, and STEM-loving kids.

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Nothing says it’s a real home like being able to see all the spices. The Container Store’s Expanding Three-Tier Organizer has three little shelves and can expand to nearly 2 feet long for plenty of room to arrange spices and jars. I don’t know about your spice shelf, but our house has a collection of hot sauces and extra containers of furikake (we can never remember if we’re running out yet) that are much easier to navigate with the three-shelf setup. It’s not an expensive item, either, but really cleans up a shelf in your pantry in a matter of minutes.

This hand vacuum from Shark has made a distinct improvement in my life, so distinct I'm actually upset I never thought to get one sooner. Toddler threw his dinner all over the floors again? Hand vac it up. Drilling curtain rods into the walls got plaster everywhere? Hand vac saves the day. The Shark UltraCyclone Pet Pro is—surprise surprise, given the name—designed for pet messes, which makes it perfect for when my cat decides his kibble should cover the kitchen floor or has covered my bathroom in his dark gray hair again. It’s small enough to store on pantry shelves or a hall closet without being obtrusive, but really is insanely handy for quick messes and clean-ups.

A home upgrade probably means more bathrooms than ever before. Which means your new favorite homeowner probably does not own enough bath mats already to fill their brand-new bathrooms. Nothing’s less fun than getting out of the shower and finding your feet on cold tile, so help fill up those bathrooms by gifting a cozy bath mat. Specifically, Cold Picnic’s plush bath mats. They’re super soft on your feet, and have a nice handful of abstract designs that can blend into any home. Cold Picnic uses organic cotton for the mats, which is a great bonus, and there’s a nonslip backing to keep it secure.

This bundle combines two delicious things: Flour + Water pasta and Jacobsen salt. The bundle comes with a box of organic spaghetti noodles, compressed discs of salt made for adding to your pasta water, Tellicherry peppercorns in a grinder, and a recipe for a blender hack approach to cacio e pepe. It’s a great gift for moving in, since it’s a mostly-easy dinner (you need to grind a lot of pepper for the recipe!) and the pepper and salt will last for a while. If you want to make it a complete gift, include the two cheeses the recipe calls for—Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano Reggiano—and if you really want to go the whole mile, stay and make the recipe for them. They’re wiped after moving boxes, after all.

Moving into a new home always feels like I’m in the cleanest place I’ve ever lived. Fresh paint! A clean shower! A stove that isn’t covered in burned rice remains! But it’s work to keep it that way. My new favorite tool to clean with is SonicPower’s Electric Spin Scrubber. It’s great to grab for shower stains and sticky sink buildup, and it comes with four different brushes so that you can pair the right brush with the right area of your home, like the hard brush for my shower floor and scour brush for the stovetop. It’s got simple controls: one button to turn it on and switch between low and high power mode, and a little screen to show how much battery life is left.

If they love to bake, whether it’s homemade scones or just premade cookie dough from the grocery store (I’ve got aspirations of the former but currently have the latter in my fridge), these Great Jones baking sheets are both great for baking and fun to look at. The baking sheets come in five food-themed colors: raspberry pink, mustard yellow, broccoli green, blueberry blue, and pepper black, and can come as a half-sheet or two quarter sheets, or a set of both sizes. The two quarter sheets double nicely as little serving trays for a party.

Good oven mitts are a must in any home, especially ones that last. My favorite I’ve ever tried are Food52’s Five Two Silicone Oven Mitts. They’ve got great grip and a soft interior, and are nice and long to keep your wrists protected. These oven mitts are big enough for different hand sizes to use, but as someone with small hands, I’m still able to get a good grip and keep hot pans balanced when using these oven mitts. There’s a matching set of pot holders ($30) you can snag too—I grab these just as often as I grab the regular oven mitts.

These are some of the best sets of sheets I’ve ever slept on. Buffy’s known for its range of eucalyptus sheets and comforters (many of which we love!) but the brand has recently added its first cotton product: Supima Cotton Sheet Set. The sheets are percale, so they have a one-over-one thread style that keeps them nice and breathable, but the long-staple Supima cotton makes it softer than other cotton percale sheets. It’s honestly everything I want in a sheet, and even my percale-hating husband commented how much he likes these sheets. These are a great price, too, and Buffy runs a lot of good sales.

I’m naturally biased in thinking that every home can use a smart bulb. I’ve written about them for years, and am always using a different one at any given time. But every home has that hard-to-reach lamp that would just be so much easier to control with a voice command or tap on a smartphone. Mine’s in my living room, where the lamp in the far corner has no connected light switch for me to control it with. Sure, I could go pull up the corded light switch from its hiding spot under my son’s craft table to control it, or I could just tell my smart speaker to do it for me. Cync makes great, well-priced smart bulbs (specifically the Direct Connect Full Color line) with tons of great colors that don’t require a hub to use. I also really like Cync’s Undercabinet Puck Lights to add fancy lighting to my kitchen, especially since they’re light enough to use with Command strips instead of the included hardware.

I’ve had a lot of placemats that didn’t live long, especially now that I have a toddler. But Uashmama’s Tec Placemats have managed to not only survive my messy household, but look good while doing it. These placemats are made from the brand’s sustainable washable paper, and are easy to hand wash away any mess you or the tiny humans in your house leave behind after dinner. I like the geometric feel of the two-toned designs, and love how they look both around the table or even piled on my buffet table, waiting for another meal to put them to work. It’s a good price too for such easy-to-clean placemats that can last.

Moving into a new home sounds like a magical time to get everything organized, right? I thought so, too, and then the chaos of moving in turned every closet I owned into a dumping ground. The top shelves of both my hall closet and my bedroom closet were the worst offenders. So much space, turned into haphazard piles of sweaters and random accessories. Until, that is, I added The Container Store’s Like-It modular bins and drawers to the top of my closet. You can stack them if you’ve got the height space, but I even found just two bins side by side suddenly organized sweaters that usually took up double the space. The drawers are handy too for more miscellaneous items. I’ll be adding these to every closet in the house, slowly and surely, and I’m sure any other homeowner you know would love them just as much as I do.

Dusen Dusen has a ton of colorful home pieces, and I’m a big believer that you can never have enough towels. I like using the company's House Stripe towels after a shower, and these would be fun to have on for guest bathrooms that could use a little color while waiting for a guest to use them. There’s also a hand towel set if you’d like to gift some pops of color for those daily handwashing sessions. Dusen Dusen has different colorways for both the bath and hand towels, so while you can’t gift a matching set, you can gift an array of colors for the giftee's brand-new bathrooms.

Moving is stressful. You know what can help with that? A weighted blanket. The knitted style you'll find with popular blankets like Bearaby, our top pick in our guide to the best weighted blankets, is both great for staying comfortable and pretty to look at when it’s thrown over the couch. Bearaby’s Tree Napper is a great option, and it does a nice job of being a little cozy while keeping plenty of airflow. But I also really like Nuzzie’s Ice Knit Blanket ($239), which looks similar but has an icy touch to it thanks to the bamboo fabric used. Both have different weights they offer, and you’ll want to hit 10 percent of the new homeowner’s weight, so I recommend looking at the weight options for each to find the perfect one to buy.

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