2019

Cimi Incense Holder

Concept, Design & Development

Look at the skyline of a city like Milan and the chimney is there: a giant, a monument to industry and to the smoke it once poured into the sky. Cimi begins with a simple, almost magical gesture: take that object, shrink it, invert its meaning and let it into the home. What was vast and polluting becomes small and gentle, an everyday piece that fills a room with scent instead of smog.

Cimi was born inside Vapore Studio, an experimental practice we ran with Matteo Benedettini. The challenge was to change the scale, function and nature of an architectural icon all at once: to turn a symbol of pollution into one of purification, and a fragment of cityscape into a quiet object of reflection on our relationship with the air we breathe.

The design keeps the chimney’s silhouette but reengineers it around incense. A satin copper tube holds the stick and channels the smoke upward like a real flue, a glazed ceramic cone collects the ash cleanly inside, and a cast-concrete base grounds it with weight and stability. Three materials, concrete, ceramic and copper, chosen for the tactile contrast between industrial memory and refined object.

Cimi was produced as a limited series of twelve, in two colorways, pink and green: a small object carrying a large message about mindful living and clean air.


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