*AD – the item in this review was gifted to our household for this post. All opinions, as always, are our own.
Dann is a huge fan of maps. He’s got loads of them scattered about, although some have gotten a bit warn over the years. The biggest map we have, featured in the living room, is a map of the world that gets scratched off whenever we end up in a new country or state, with the hopes of it eventually being a full, colourful map. With his love of maps in mind, when The Book of Everyone reached out with a personalised map, I jumped on the opportunity.
After talking over loads of locations for The Map of Everyone, we settled on Loughton – a town quite near to us that we tend to visit regularly. Loughton train station is the one we take into London every time we want to go into the town, and it is the train station that Dann use to meet me at for tabletop nights. There is a restaurant called Wing Shack in Loughton, which is my favourite wings place and Dann’s overall favourite place to eat. Often we have little nights out at the pub in Loughton or just spent walking around the town, to see the shops and go shopping. It’s just a cute town that we always seem to end up at when we have few spare hours to hang out and don’t want to be at home. At one point, we started joking about how the town was basically ours.
When it came to designing The Map of Everyone, the website was super easy to use. After typing in a post code, the page generators a map for you to preview. This map can be zoomed in or out, adjusting itself to what you prefer. After picking the positioning we wanted, we picked the light blue colour under style (though there are a bunch of colours to pick from), choose the star icon to showcase the exact location in Loughton, and updated the label at the top. There are a few choices when it comes to the icon needed to mark the exact location, and the label can contain you and your partner’s name, as well as the longitude and latitude that make up that location. Once everything is set, you can just order your print and wait for it to come in the mail!
Our map came quickly and was beautifully wrapped in the most interesting paper I’ve ever seen. This stuff is thick and fun to open, revealing a bunch of bubble wrap and our beautiful map. Having such a personalised bit of map, showcasing a town we know inside and out, is a wonderful addition to our home. We picked a location that is meaningful to us, but it’s easy to pick a location that means something for you and your partner, for a very cute, personalised gift.
You can get The Map of Everyone on their website.
I love this! What a lovely gift idea <3
It’s so cute.