Bridie Hall, London

In eighteenth-century Rome, one of the most popular things to bring home from the Grand Tour fitted in a drawer. Workshops in the city took impressions of the ancient engraved gems held in the great collections - emperors, gods, lions, heroes - cast them in plaster or sulphur, and set them in tidy rows inside boxes made to look like books. A young gentleman could not take the Vatican home with him. He could take a hundred small pieces of antiquity, each the size of a thumbnail.

Bridie Hall has never taken the Grand Tour. That is rather the point. "I make objects that feel they were created in another era," she says, "inspired by the Grand Tour I never took."

She grew up in New Zealand - about as far from Rome as it is possible to be, which anyone reading this in Australia will understand - and has lived in London for two decades. Since 2008 she has co-run Pentreath & Hall on Rugby Street in Bloomsbury with her old friend, the architect and designer Ben Pentreath. In a studio above the shop she designs her range, and still makes some of it by hand there, the découpage and intaglio work especially. She has described a five-litre tin of Briwax as "one of my greatest possessions."

I have stood in that shop on Rugby Street, turning her pieces over in my hands, without realising that the person behind them might well have been working one floor above my head. We have still never met. But her work has always struck me as exactly the kind of thing The Leopard exists for, and now, at last, it is here.

The pieces that have just arrived at The Leopard read like the contents of a returning traveller's trunk. Portrait plaques of Dante, Tasso and Byron, three poets every Grand Tourist would have carried in his head. Paperweights set with intaglios of Diana and Hercules. Paper trays printed with Piranesi's Rome. A series of Greek urn prints. And soaps, which is where she has done something genuinely clever.

Each intaglio soap is cast in two parts. The top is an unscented white relief, hardened with a little beeswax so the classical detail holds its edge as the bar is used. Beneath it sits a coloured body made with Rowse honey, scented with cardamom and mimosa, lavender, or eucalyptus. It is a piece of antiquity that, unlike the originals, you are allowed to wear away.

There is something fitting about these objects finding their way to the Southern Highlands. They were made by someone from the far side of the world, imagining a journey she never made, for people who are - most of us - just as far from Rome. The Grand Tour was always partly an act of imagination. Bridie Hall simply admits it.

Bridie Hall's collection is exclusive to Australia through The Leopard, and available now in store in Moss Vale and online.