kubus candleholder

powder-coated steel

Mogens Lassen designed the Kubus in 1962 as a side commission — the interior of a restaurant in northern Zealand, Denmark — and then kept it mostly to himself for decades. He gave them to family, friends, and close architect colleagues. His grandson Søren began making them commercially in the 1990s, and the world caught up quickly. The proportions are mathematical: every dimension derived from the first, nothing left to chance.

There is a specific quality to candlelight filtered through a steel grid — the shadows it throws are as considered as the object itself. Lassen was a pioneer of Danish functionalism who took his cues from Bauhaus sensibilities, and the Kubus is the distillation of that thinking into the most domestic of forms: a candle on a table.

selected because it is the object that most quietly announces what kind of home this is.