Shopping inside an art gallery isn’t usually recommended unless you’re looking for coffee table books or a souvenir pencil, but it just got a whole lot more appealing.

Local design studio &company have recently opened their first “store”, a 6-month pop-up venture inside the Gaffa museum. &company aims to give a leg up to emerging designers by opening a window of opportunity, helping them out with mentoring and marketing while letting the rest of us get our eager hands on innovative homewares and other creations that make amazing gifts — if you possess enough willpower to give them away. &company are not a design label as such but rather a generator for creativity, spawning beautiful artifacts through hosting a range of events, exhibitions and collaborative opportunities.

In their short lifespan they have exhibited and collaborated with Gaffa a few times, so it makes sense that their first physical store should exist within their doors. The tiny space sits in a holding cell in the museum’s Arcade — the heritage-listed building used to be a police station — and is full of gorgeous things that are as useful as they are visually charming. There are white Milkskin bottles and Bounty oyster shells by &company designers Harriet Watts and Naomi Taplin, fantastically quirky tea towels, and a whole heap of other stocking-stuffers-on-steroids things that you should probably buy two of for when you decide you don’t want to part with them after all.

Another thing you’ll want to do inside the pop-up is touch everything, which is normally prohibited inside art galleries. But though &company knows that beautiful things are all well and good, they’re also aware of how annoying it is when they’re too delicate to actually use in real life — so everything in the store, as well as being 100% made in Australia (and very frequently by hand) is designed to be loved and used everyday.

Need a further excuse to get some Christmas shopping done early? Black Star Pastry will be bringing their famous macaroons and ginger ninjas all the way from the Inner West to the opposite holding cell. Because if there’s one thing that says “holiday season” more than shopping for beautiful things, it’s eating beautiful desserts.