What do you get for the person who has everything? Take a visit to Connolly. Perhaps London’s most stylish shop, it is a vault of beautiful things — endless objets d’art, but also more usual items refined past the point of rationality. A fondue set with antler handles. The world’s most elegant set of dominoes. Salt and pepper cellars whose weight might only be second to their cost. Or how about an oyster shell tray for caviar, with matching mother-of-pearl spoon? No, no, no. What you really want is the handmade, hand-knitted, cashmere cable crew necks. Only eight are produced each year. They are, however, reliably a sell-out.
Ralph Lauren once declared Connolly his “favourite store in the world.” It is not hard to see why. Or smell why, for that matter: the shop, with its scent of leather and wood-smoke and tobacco, smells the way you imagine a forest-bound country house might, if it were owned by a racing driver from the 1950s.
