Here, we round up the household products that are easiest on the planet and easiest on the eye.
Cleaning Products
Homecourt
Remember how keen Monica from Friends was on cleanliness? Well now the actress who played her has created a range of “beauty products for the home”, aka the prettiest cleaning products on the planet. Homecourt – which includes dish soap, surface cleaner and room spray – uses skincare-grade ingredients that are all derived from plants. It launched in the US last year but has just begun shipping its goodies directly to the UK. This is only the beginning of a beautiful thing, however. Cox told How to Spend It magazine: ‘I’d like to do laundry detergent, pods and liquid – the opportunities are limitless. One day we’ll do things for the home, like blankets, but we want to ensure people really understand the brand before we launch into something new.’ Explore more.
Diptyque
It was only a matter of time before the chicest purveyor of candles and scent came up with a cleaning range and, praise be, Diptyque did so last year. There isn’t a present that could make a hostess happier than a bottle of their Multi Surface Cleaner, Dishwashing Liquid or Wood-care Lotion. La Droguerie is a collection of household products designed to bring beauty to everyday life – with natural ingredients. In their elegant, refillable glass bottles, these beauties clean and degrease and descale and nourish and shine all washable surfaces in the home. Explore more.
Colt & Willow
Household cleaning brand, Colt & Willow offers sustainable, plant-based cleaning products that work really well but also look and smell great, too. All the honest ingredients are listed on the labels so you know that you're getting a trustworthy eco-cleaning solution. The long-lasting glass bottles can be refilled with recyclable PET litre bottles available via subscription. Housework just got a whole lot more pleasant. Explore more.
Tincture London
Tincture London sells all-natural cleaning products in simple but distinctive white hexagonal bottles. The reviews are unremittingly positive, with press and users alike raving that they work just as well as chemical products, while leaving the house smelling beautiful. But there’s more to them than simply looking and smelling good. The website’s homepage offers a scary statistic: that the air in the average house is between two and five times more polluted than outside on account of the toxic chemicals we use to keep our homes clean.
All Tincture bottles are made from recycled plastic, which can be recycled again, but Tincture encourages its customers to buy refills for their bottles instead. We recommend the Starter Set (washing up tincture; bathroom tincture; glass mirror steel tincture; floor concentrate; furniture tincture) to get you going; you’re unlikely to look back. Explore more.
Mangle & Wringer
This is a truly lovely brand with a truly lovely story. Founded in the Cotswolds in 2012, Mangle & Wringer is the brainchild of Vanessa Willes, a former architect and interior designer. Suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, her career hit a natural hiatus, which is when serendipity stepped in and she met one Bette Smith, a local lady who helped her around the house while she recovered. As the two spent more time together, Vanessa learned more about Bette’s fascinating life: born in the 1920s, she went into service at the age of 14 in Belgravia, where she rose through the domestic ranks from kitchen and laundry maid to lady’s maid. It was only when she met her husband that she left service and moved to Gloucestershire to raise her family.
But Bette was not one to sit still for long: she soon set up her own laundry and housekeeping business via which she became known as Mrs Mangle. When her daughter, Margaret, joined her, she was duly known as Mrs Wringer. The thrifty duo only ever used cleaning products that they had made themselves – all minus nasty chemicals.
In 2012, she passed on her lifetime’s worth of recipes to Vanessa, who put them to excellent use to found the beautifully presented and packaged Mangle & Wringer. Customers can buy Natural Bleach in a paper bag, or Kitchen Cleanser and Bathroom Balm, both of which come in a beautiful tin. Downton Abbey style cleaning, with no nasties. Explore more.
And As For Utensils…
Alistair Hendy
We love Alistair Hendy, the writer, chef, photographer, shopkeeper and architectural restorer who has carved a life out of his obsession with the below-stairs aesthetic and meticulous attention to detail.
Following a career as an award-winning photographer, Hendy worked as a chef for Carluccio. But when he saw that a shop in Hastings Old Town, which had been badly neglected and criminally ‘modernised’ with laminates and linoleum, was going cheap, he saw potential and leaped.
After a painstaking and expensive renaissance, he opened A G Hendy and Co in 2011. This homeware store makes something utterly beautiful of the below-stairs aesthetic, selling exquisite brushes, pans and domestic implements for the home.
‘There’s a poetry in the everyday,’ Hendy explains. ‘The unashamed elegance of the domestic has been my go-to all my life: from the scrubbed tables and creamware of below-stairs in country houses – not forgetting their drab painted cupboards, shelved pantries, exposed pipework and batteries of scullery sinks.’
He sells a mixture of vintage and new pieces and everything is made from natural materials – from the wooden scrubbing brushes to the linen-thread string to the ostrich feather dusters. Each item is built not only to look beautiful but to last a lifetime.
Objects of Use
Objects of Use, whose bricks and mortar incarnation is in central Oxford, has a winningly simple and stylish website. Super easy to navigate, it offers traditional cleaning utensils presented in a functional, spare and modern way. On it, you’ll find all you need for the garden, kitchen and wider home – but, call us weird, we especially like the section labelled ‘cleaning’.
There are outdoor bamboo brooms, a pleasingly shaped horsehair indoor Vienna broom and even wooden baby bottle brushes. We also love all the natural blocks of soap and bags of soap flakes – be gone throwaway dispensers – and the fact that there isn’t a scrap of plastic in sight.
Labour and Wait
Labour and Wait’s physical corner shop is a beauty, with its green Victorian tiles and simple Gill Sans signage. Its website is wholly reflective of that restrained style, as is the contents of its shops, which ranges from clothing – think fisherman’s jumpers and cotton Breton tops – to larder and household staples. For the pantry, there is a glut of mustards and jams in glass or earthenware containers, all of which are eminently reusable. We are in love with the Bucket with Wooden Handle, which glorifies form and function.
By Becky Ladenburg
Updated April 2024
