Styler: Buy Me: Decorative condom boxes Maria Maxwell pounds 20 to poun ds 100

Deeply romantic: decorative condom boxes for Valentine's Day. They are made by Maria Maxwell, a 29-year-old French artist and are on show at the Eagle Gallery in Baker's Row, 159 Farringdon Road, London. In the past eight months Ms Maxwell has sold 50 of them at pounds 20 to pounds 100, at shows in Marseilles, Aix-en-Provence, Brussels and London. Next - Paris in the spring.

"At last the condom has found a home," she declares, fingering the glass beads and seashells on one exotic specimen with a perfume sachet inside. Others contain potpourri made by nuns. Ms Maxwell's grandmother has contributed her stock of tasselled upholstery fringes. Each box is numbered and has a name, such as "The King's Entrance", which bears an anatomically explicit colour plate from an edition of the Kama Sutra.

Europeans have taken to them with alacrity. "Even older people saw the humour right away, but in London some people have been taken aback."

There is nothing so revealing, it seems, as presenting a friend with a choice of condom boxes. "I did not know some of my male friends were gay until they made straight for the gay designs," she says. To her women friends they seem to be a cue to reveal intimate secrets. Inside the boxes is a variety of tactile surprises that must be fun in the dark. My only quibble was that the wooden lids required two hands to remove. "But you also need two hands to unwrap a condom," said the ever-practical Ms Maxwell.

John Windsor

Eagle Gallery (0171-833 2674)