8 gift-to-self ideas that are on a whole new level

Fancy a splurge but not sure what to buy? Here are some great ideas for the man who has everything:

The razor: an item so essential to most men on the planet that it’s undeniably important to invest in one that’s going to give you everything – and more – that you could possibly want from a shaving instrument. Step in Zafirro, which has brought out the first ever razor with sapphire blades, a pure iridium (the strongest metal and densest function metal on the planet) centrepiece and pure platinum screws. True class, yes, but also functionality in the highest form. Gone are the days of countless, flimsy razors that last a week at best, and here to stay is an investment that every gentleman is worthy of.

£67,000/$100,000 zafirro.com

Bottle openers are two a penny and rarely designed with anything other than practical considerations in mind. Californian design studio Discommon has uncapped the trend by creating a beautifully crafted bottle opener that’s as much a piece of functional art as a kitchen tool. The idea for it came from a bar of soap its creators found in a Costa Rican hotel that slotted naturally into the palm of the hand. The same form inspired the Damascus Steel Coin bottle opener. It’s not made of soap though – instead, Discommon machined it out of aerospace aluminium, and fitted it with a brushed stainless tool steel ‘coin’, to hook off bottle caps with ease.

£230/$340 discommon.com

While exploring the largely uncharted woods, fields and rivers of the New World to collect, study and send dried specimens back to his native England, Naturalist Mark Catesby (1682-1749) discovered a rare gift for drawing. He would return from Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands with incredibly detailed watercolour drawings of birds, animals, insects, plants, trees and fish – many of which were new to European eyes. Addison Publications has brought these together in a highly collectible four-volume first facsimile edition, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. The last 20 copies are presented in four hand-printed, craft-bound volumes, finished with intricate gold leaf tooling.

£39,500/$59,000 by Addison Publications Ltd, London addisonpublications.com

Experts have declared that Icon’s A5 plane could change the face of aviation. The two-seat, amphibious light sport plane has fold-away wings, a built-in safety parachute, and a range of over 550km – oh, and it can be stored in your garage.

Made by California-based start-up Icon Aircraft, the A5 can take off and land on land or water, and because its take-off weight is only 686kg, it has a relatively short take-off distance of 710 feet on land and 920 feet on water. That means you could tow it to a local waterway and go flying, without ever needing to go near a runway.

Inside the A5’s carbon fibre shell is a 100-horsepower engine that gives it a maximum speed of 176km/h (109mph). At the moment, Icon Aircraft is taking pre-orders, with first deliveries expected this summer.

£127,000/$189,000 iconaircraft.com

The eye-wateringly expensive racing simulator from Hammacher Schlemmer is apparently so realistic that Ford has used it to demonstrate what it feels like to throw a race car around a track.

The machine has a suspended monocoque fibreglass chassis that rolls, pitches and rotates through 360 degrees in a bid to simulate the effects of taking a corner at 200mph, and presumably of crashing into a tyre wall, too.

It does this using built-in linear servo actuators that can generate forces up to 0.5G – modest by race standards, but not for living-room gaming. Instruments panels and a steering wheel lifted from real race cars and three screens complete the picture.

£125,000/$185,000 hammacher.com

Most gentlemen have, at some point in their life, dreamt of living in a treehouse. Jeremy Pitts is now making that dream a reality by creating beautifully crafted and fully functioning treehouses – without the tree, and with a few home comforts built in.

Each treehouse is entirely hand built using a completely insulated, pre-fabricated shell and is produced using natural wood – from the Sweet Chestnut tree trunks that it sits on to the Rippled English Oak and English Walnut native timbers used in the structure.

What most stands out about these beautiful designs is the use of timber and wood, and Pitts’s clear appreciation for nature and the outdoors. The idea behind the designs is not to create something outlandish or out-of-place, but something that blends into the landscape. Each treehouse is placed on a coppice of Sweet Chestnut trunks cut from the surrounding woods and then dressed in split pieces of timber from the same tree.

As the treehouses are bespoke, they can be built to your specifications, right down to the size of the windows and all the interior fittings. But to give you an example, the one pictured above can sleep up to four people, and has a foldaway work desk, seating and a wood-burning stove built in. It’s not totally rustic, though – it comes with electric light and power, a Second World War field telephone so you can call back to your house, and a camera obscura to project the surrounding trees onto the internal walls.

Prices start at around £65,000/$97,000 jeremypitts.co.uk

It might look like a flying Formula 1 car from the future, but the DeepFlight Dragon is in fact a submarine. More than that, it’s a submarine designed so you don’t have to be a submarine commander in order to pilot it.

The genius inventor behind it is Graham Hawkes, a man with an underwater CV that includes designing subs for oil and gas companies and torpedoes for the Royal Navy. He’s created a machine that can both fly and hover in water, in the same way a drone does in the air. The difference here is that unlike air, water can hold weight because it’s 850 times denser. That means that the Dragon’s modest 15-kilowatt-hour battery provides six hours of power – more than enough to take you and a friend on an adventure through the underwater world.

The Dragon runs unique software called DeepFlight Diving Manager, which monitors and manages critical functions so you can helm the submarine down to its 120-metre maximum depth with minimal training. It’s also got fixed positive buoyancy so that it floats naturally back to the surface without needing to worry about ballast or drop weights.

Getting your hands on one of these underwater flying machines won’t be easy, though. When the Dragon goes on sale, it’s expected to come in at around $1.5m, and you’ll need a yacht to keep it on. Good news is that at 1,800kg and five-metres long, it’s compatible with more yachts than any other personal sub on the market.

£POA deepflight.com

If you’re looking to splash some serious cash on something collectible this year, Imperiali Genève may have the answer: the Emperador, the most exclusive and prestigious cigar chest in the world.

Priced at a rounded one million Swiss francs (£675,000/$1,000,000), this magnificent humidor is the result of approximately 100 craftsmen from 27 different trades putting in 18,000 hours of work over a span of two years, not to mention a handful of international patents and 2,675 high-quality components manufactured by state-of-the-art technology.

The makers of the Emperador say they’ve invented the world’s first self-regulating humidity system, and that humidity inside the chest is guaranteed to stay at 70 per cent, without the need for any human intervention and regardless of external weather conditions.The case contains 24 Grand Cru cigars, each of which is wrapped in four gold leaves inside a glass tube. Hundreds of combinations of meticulously selected tobaccos were required to achieve the final blend. Access can only be gained by inputting a secret personal code, but the crowning glory is a tourbillon – an old-school regulating device found in some of the world’s most expensive watches.

And there’s more. It has ingenious devices incorporated into the front of the chest that either mechanically cut or punch a hole in the end of cigar. It’ll also offer you an ashtray whenever it detects a cigar is brought near. However, these moments are only available to a privileged few because just 12 numbered pieces will be produced annually.