Back

Scentury

lighting

Scent carries memory.

Client
Fluora
Category
Lighting, collectible table lamp
Year
2026
Scope
Industrial design, form development, CMF
Channel
Collectible edition

Constraint

Pro Retro, presented by IDSA NYC and Fluora and curated by Not For Granted Studio, asked for a freestanding lamp lit by Fluora's Monos that would record the people who own it. Each lamp was to begin a story rather than arrive with one, and leave a visible marker from every generation it passed through. The selected designs were built and shown at Collectible NYC in November 2026.

The brief named the problem behind it. Functional objects get thrown out when the style changes, and Pro Retro's answer was meaning. Its own examples were the championship cup and the family quilt.

The reference came from somewhere else. In each country on a sabbatical, the souvenir was a fragrance from a local perfume house, and in shop after shop the way to smell one was to lift a glass cloche. Those bottles now hold the trip better than the photos do.

Glass dome over a glowing shade, sealed test tubes holding paper blotters set between its ribs

Decision

Twelve glass test tubes ring the Monos under a glass cloche, one for each owner, each holding a blank acid-free cotton blotter. When the lamp changes hands, the new owner lifts the cloche, draws out the next empty tube, sprays their fragrance on the blotter, and writes their name and the year. Then the tube is sealed and returned to the ring. Smell is the sense most closely tied to memory, so opening a tube brings that person back into the room. The scents soften over the decades. The names stay.

The tubes are glass partly for what they do to the light. They bend it a little and make the names inside glow.

The other half was the form. A lamp meant to stay in a family has to live in a room without looking odd. From across the room, Scentury reads as an ambient table lamp. Closer in, the tubes inside the glass raise a question: what is that? The design holds both reads at once, belonging comfortably in a space and carrying enough interest to earn a second look.

Hand drawing one sealed glass tube out of the ring around the glowing shade

Finish

Glass cloche. Twelve glass test tubes with silicone stoppers, each holding an acid-free cotton paper blotter. Diffuser and housing 3D printed in light-diffusing filament. Cast ceramic base. Built around Fluora's Monos.