The Luxury Cigar Ashtray: A Gift Guide for the Man Who Has Everything

A luxury cigar ashtray is the gift for the man who has everything, because it is the one piece of cigar equipment he almost certainly does not have. We see it every week. A customer walks in with a cabinet humidor at home, a Brizard cutter in his pocket and a torch he has owned for a decade, and the thing he rests a forty dollar cigar on is a saucer. Every ashtray we carry, from a glazed ceramic in six colors to a palladium-plated Italian marquetry piece, is in our cigar ashtray collection, and this guide walks through which one fits which man.

The reason it makes such a good gift is simple. A humidor lives in a study where nobody sees it. A cutter is in a pocket. An ashtray sits on the terrace table, the desk, the bar cart, and every guest who sits down looks at it. It is the most visible object in the whole ritual, and it is the one most people buy last, if at all. Give it, and it gets used within the week, in front of other people, with your name attached to it.

Why gifts for men who have everything usually miss

Most gifts for a man like this fail for one of two reasons. Either he already owns a better version, or the gift asks him to change a habit. A cigar ashtray does neither. He is already smoking on the terrace. He already has the cigars. You are simply replacing the object he tolerates with the object he would have chosen if he had ever stopped to think about it. That is why, of all the pieces we help people give, the ashtray is so often the one that gets photographed and sent back to the giver. Our broader guide to luxury gifts for cigar lovers ranks the whole accessory shelf by budget. This page is about the one item on that shelf that says the most for the least effort.

What a luxury cigar ashtray actually needs to do

A cigar is not a cigarette. It is thick, it is heavy, and it spends a good part of the hour resting rather than in the hand. An ashtray built for it has three jobs: hold the cigar level without letting it roll, catch a long ash that falls in one piece, and do both without the cigar's own heat marking the surface. The pieces below all do those three things. What separates them is the material, the size and how many people he smokes with.

One more thing to count before you buy: the rests. A single smoker is happy with two. A man who hosts wants four, and he wants them set apart so two resting cigars never touch. Every product page in our collection lists the number, and it is the first thing we ask when someone calls us about a gift.

Our picks, by the room it will live in

For the terrace: El Septimo Fabuloso

The El Septimo Fabuloso Ashtray is the one we hand most people first, because it does everything an outdoor ashtray should and it costs less than a box of the cigars it will hold. It is a jumbo glazed ceramic, eight and a quarter inches across and nearly three inches deep, with four wide rests and El Septimo's gold foiling around the rim. The basin is deep enough for a full evening's ash from four people. It is made for indoor and outdoor use, it does not rust, fade or crack, and it comes in a colored gift box, so there is nothing to wrap. We stock it in white, red, blue, green, orange and a Caribbean black, and the black is the one we would put beside a pool.

For the lounge with some personality: the Safari Collection

El Septimo's Safari pieces are ceramic ashtrays with a single animal painted across the face, and the Peacock Safari Ashtray is the showpiece of the three. The rests are wide enough for a 60 ring gauge, and the artwork is bold enough that it works as a centerpiece with nothing in it. There is also an elephant and a horse in the same series, and the whole range of the house's non-cigar pieces is in the El Septimo accessories collection. This is the gift for the man whose lounge already has a point of view.

For the desk: Alfonso Gran Selección porcelain

The Alfonso Gran Selección Porcelain Cigar Ashtray is the quietest thing on this page and, for the right man, the best. It is white porcelain sculpted into a rose petal, and it reads as a decorative object before it reads as an ashtray at all. We would give it to the man whose office is already careful, where a colored ceramic would shout. Alfonso is the Costa Rican line from Selected Tobacco, the house behind Atabey and Byron, and if he smokes any of those, the connection will land.

For the modern interior: Davidoff Concrete

Davidoff cast this one in ultra-high-performance concrete reinforced with glass fibre, then framed it in metal so the cigars rest on the frame and not the stone. The Large White Concrete Ashtray has four rests set at staggered heights so the ash from one cigar never crosses another, a gold-tone frame, and a footprint just over seven inches. The small version in dark grey, with a rose gold frame and two rests, is the desk-sized one. Both are dense, glossy, and easy to wipe.

For the collector: El Septimo Emperor and Sacred Arts porcelain

These are the ones that get asked about at the table. El Septimo prints the artwork of its cigar collections onto fine porcelain at high resolution, seals it under a clear protective coating so it will not fade, and finishes the base in genuine leather. The Emperor Napoleon Ashtray matches the Napoleon cigars, the Emperor Yao matches the Yao line, and the Sacred Arts Van Gogh matches the Sacred Arts collection; all three are in the collection block further down. The Emperor Vartan is a limited edition. If he already smokes El Septimo, buy the ashtray that carries the same name as his favorite box. That is a gift that proves you paid attention.

For the man who has genuinely everything: Maccarrone Dolcevita Double

The Maccarrone Dolcevita Double Ashtray is not an accessory. It is a piece of furniture that happens to hold two cigars. The body is mahogany veneer with maple marquetry inlaid by hand, polished to a high-gloss lacquer, and the tray and the two rests are solid brass plated in palladium. It is made in Maccarrone's workshop in Tuscany, over weeks, as part of the house's Yacht Collection, and we are an official distributor for Maccarrone in the United States. If the man you are buying for has a bar cart he is proud of, this is what goes on it.

The box to set beside it

An ashtray on its own is a fine gift. An ashtray with a box of the matching cigars is the gift he talks about. Match the house, and where you can, match the name.

Beside the Emperor Napoleon porcelain, the El Septimo Napoleon Maduro Royal Salomon, a nine inch by 55 figured cigar in a box of twenty. It looks enormous and smokes gently, mild to medium, all espresso and dark cocoa, and it is the cigar we reach for when someone wants a showpiece that will not knock them over. Beside the Emperor Yao, the El Septimo Yao Maduro Torpedo, a dark, oily 6 1/2 by 60 with the same espresso and cocoa in a bolder register, also in a box of twenty. Both are Costa Rican, long-aged, and we hold more of both than anyone we know of.

Beside the Alfonso porcelain, the Alfonso Extra Añejo No. 4 Toro Grande, a box of twenty five. The tobacco is aged five years on cedar and French oak, and you taste both woods, with cream, vanilla and toasted nut behind them. It is the most refined cigar on this page. Beside the Davidoff concrete, the Davidoff Winston Churchill Belicoso in its tin of four, a short, medium figurado with cream and fresh spice up front and black coffee behind. It fits the small concrete ashtray's two rests as though they were measured for each other.

If the ashtray is the start of a larger gift

An ashtray pairs naturally with the two tools he will use with it. A cutter or a torch from the same house completes the table, and our cutter and lighter guide explains what each step up in price buys. Every torch and soft flame we stock is in cigar lighters. If the occasion is big enough for a humidor, the humidor buying guide sorts desktop from electronic by how many cigars he keeps.

For a client rather than a friend, the same pieces work and the rules change slightly; our guide to the closing gift covers what to send someone who can buy anything, and why an ashtray with the right cigars in it outlasts a bottle. Where a message or engraving is offered, we add it before the box ships; the details are on our customization page. And if you know the man but not his cigars, the Cigar Finder narrows five hundred of them to a handful in four questions, which is a reasonable way to choose the box that goes beside the ashtray.

Every ashtray we carry

The full collection is below, with live prices, and it sits inside all of our cigar accessories if you would rather browse the whole shelf.

Questions we get asked