Cordia builds homes in Budapest, and every completed flat ends the same way: a handover, a set of keys, and a gift package handed to the people who now live there. One thing in that package has been a custom building kit, made for Cordia, assembled by the new owners on the spot.

A handover happens once. The keys change hands, the paperwork is signed, and the moment is over in about the time it takes to walk a hallway. A developer who wants that day remembered has to put something in it that outlasts it. The hard part is not finding a gift. It is finding one that survives the year after, because most handover gifts are consumed, stored, or quietly given away, and the ones that do get kept are kept in a drawer.

The first answer was a house. A small brick house with orange walls, a dark pitched roof, and a working clock set into the gable, built by the new owners themselves on the day the home became theirs. A clock has to go on a wall or a shelf to do its job, which means the object cannot be put away without being turned off, and a house-shaped one earns that wall in a home that has just been bought. Later came a plant: a potted flower in Cordia's own orange, black and white, the mark printed on the pot, produced in a range of colourways so that neighbours on the same landing were not holding quite the same thing. Then came Marina City, Cordia's riverside quarter on the Pest bank of the Danube, whose own identity is a lighthouse. So the gift became one: a buildable lighthouse standing over a marina, with the development's name printed on the quay. And it lights up.