That said, Ms. Lasky admitted to being “completely seduced by the craft movement. I find myself spending more and more time on Etsy, which has turned into this amazing marketplace. It’s a very impressive development in terms of design.”

While Etsy is still the spot to find crocheted apple cozies ($7.25 from Kris0376) and raw bacon magnets ($4.99 from Design Dude), it is more and more the place to buy compelling design pieces as well, like a carpenter’s clamp bookshelf made entirely of bone china ($500 from Ricochet Studio; above). In fact, Etsy is on track to record $180 million worth of sales this year, according to its founder, Rob Kalin. That’s nearly double its sales a year ago, and almost seven times that of 2007, a stunning amount of growth in this climate.

“People are taking ‘buy local,’ one step further,” Mr. Kalin said of his four-and-a-half-year-old craft mall. “Knowing where your food comes from, or your clothes, is extending to wanting to know where your dining room table comes from. It really matters. And I think what makes gifts in particular special is knowing there’s a person who made it and a story behind it. I think people want to buy things that tell stories, especially in an age when so few store-bought items tell stories.”

On a recent rain-flecked afternoon, Mr. Alhadeff of the Future Perfect was simultaneously greeting well-wishers and merchandising, setting out familiar objects (needlepoint graffiti pillows, silver hand-grenade candles) along with more recent work (a bison fur chair by Jason Miller with cute-spooky button “eyes,” a calendar in the shape of a huge handmade plywood cross) in his new store on Great Jones Street in Manhattan. Though the Future Perfect’s expansion is a sign that the Brooklyn design movement continues to grow, it also speaks to another byproduct of the recession: more-affordable rent.

“Two years ago, we were having our best year, in terms of sales,” Mr. Alhadeff said. “But we still couldn’t afford Manhattan real estate. Now we can. It’s been an amazing opportunity.”

In the window was an assemblage of old drawers, boxes and tool carry-alls strapped together on a wheeled cart, a piece of furniture made by Joel Voisard, a Queens-based artist. Titled “Box Cart,” it came with a $6,500 price tag and fell smack into the storytelling category, owing as much to a 1991 Tejo Remy piece for Droog called You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory as to the Joads’ overstuffed car in the film version of “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Around the corner at Moss, the SoHo high-design emporium, there were candles, kitschy and lifelike, in the shape of tortoises, cactuses and elaborate layer cakes, made by Point a La Ligne, a French company known as the Rolls-Royce of candlemakers (starting at $35).