THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS WE STOPPED MAKING

We can put a computer in a wristwatch, but apparently a restaurant menu is now beyond us.

Vintage Gucci lighter

I have developed an unreasonable attachment to old hotel stationery. Not important stationery, you understand. No lost letters from Noël Coward or compromising notes discovered in the desk at Claridge's. I mean the completely ordinary stuff: envelopes, postcards, luggage labels, lighters, room keys. The things nobody at the time thought would survive.

They are often exceptionally beautiful.

A hotel in Rome might have had its name drawn across a luggage label in extravagant lettering, with an illustration of the building beneath and ROMA printed importantly across the bottom. A railway ticket was made from thick card with satisfyingly severe typography. Restaurants had menus you could hold. Shops wrapped things in paper bearing their own names. Even a box of matches might have been illustrated by somebody who appeared to take the assignment extremely seriously.

We have, of course, improved all of this.

The hotel key is now a white plastic rectangle that stops working if you introduce it to your telephone. The railway ticket is a QR code. The restaurant menu is another QR code. Your boarding pass is also a QR code. Much of modern life now involves presenting various black-and-white squares to machines and hoping they recognise you.

This is mostly convenient. It is also mostly rather bleak.

The interesting question isn't whether things were better in the past, a dangerous line of enquiry that usually ends with somebody advocating the return of outdoor lavatories but why we once thought ordinary objects deserved beauty.

Take travel. The great railway companies and ocean liners understood that a journey began long before departure. Tickets, timetables, posters and luggage labels were part of the seduction. The destination was sold through typography and illustration before anybody had packed a suitcase.

Those luggage labels are particularly wonderful. Hotels pasted them onto trunks and cases, with each journey leaving another little piece of graphic evidence behind. The battered suitcase gradually became a passport of its own. Today you can travel around the world and return with almost no physical proof that you went anywhere, apart from 1,847 photographs of approximately the same sunset and a charging cable you don't remember buying.

Restaurants have suffered an equally mysterious decline in paper.

A menu used to be part of the establishment's personality. It could be grand, funny, illustrated, handwritten or slightly pompous. You could study it, turn it over and, importantly, continue speaking to the person opposite you while doing so.

Now somebody places a small wooden cube on the table and asks you to scan it.

This inevitably involves locating your telephone, discovering you have no signal, joining something called GUEST_WIFI_5G, surrendering your email address, enlarging a PDF and then passing your phone to your mother because she has forgotten her glasses.

Progress.

Perfume houses once took a different approach. They understood that if you were going to sell somebody scented liquid at an outrageous price, the least you could do was put it in a magnificent bottle. Glass was cut and frosted; stoppers were heavy; labels were exquisitely printed. The bottle sat on a dressing table and continued earning its keep long after the perfume was gone.

The same attention was lavished on powder compacts, cigarette cases, fountain pens, cocktail shakers and shaving sets. Objects were occasionally permitted to be absurdly overqualified for their jobs.

This is perhaps what I long for.

Not ornament for ornament's sake, but the idea that usefulness and beauty were not opposing ambitions. A ticket could get you onto a train and have handsome typography. A shop could sell groceries and employ somebody to paint its name above the window. A hotel could give you a key that opened the door and felt wonderful in your hand.

The old high street was particularly good at this. Look closely at photographs of British towns from a century ago and the buildings are covered in lettering. Chemists, tailors, tobacconists and cafés had painted fascias, enamel signs, gilded windows and peculiar little logos. Businesses looked different because, rather inconveniently, they actually were different.

Now there is a certain kind of shop that could be selling coffee, spectacles, skincare or £46 candles and there is absolutely no way of knowing until you enter. The walls are off-white. The lettering is sans serif. There is pale oak shelving and one very determined olive tree.

Somewhere near the till will be the word STUDIO.

None of this means contemporary design is bad. Quite the opposite. We are capable of designing extraordinary things. The problem may be that we have become so good at making things efficiently that beauty increasingly has to justify its presence.

If the ticket can live on a screen, why print one? If the menu can be updated instantly, why make one from paper? If every branch can use the same vinyl lettering, why pay somebody to paint the window?

Perfectly reasonable questions.

But civilisation would be a fairly miserable business if we only made things for perfectly reasonable reasons.

The old matchbook, the railway poster, the perfume bottle and the brass hotel key remind us that design once reached into remarkably insignificant corners of everyday life. Somebody cared what the thing looked like even though it was destined for a pocket, a suitcase or, eventually, the bin.

Perhaps we don't need to bring all of it back. I have no particular desire to carry a cardboard railway ticket collection around Britain, and anyone who has ever lost a hotel key at two in the morning will admit there are advantages to plastic.

But I would like the menu back.

That seems a reasonable place to begin.