After more than a decade working in interiors, I kept noticing the same contradiction: we buy beautiful oversized candles for their presence, then become almost reluctant to burn them. The RENE Secret Vase began with a question - could we design one differently?
There is a particular category of object that becomes almost too beautiful to use. The oversized candle is one of them. I have worked within interior design for more than ten years, and over that time I have styled countless rooms, shoots, showrooms and homes.
Again and again, I noticed the same thing. An XL candle would be bought as a substantial styling piece - something sculptural enough to anchor a coffee table, console or dining table - yet very often it remained untouched. People loved the candle. They just didn’t want to burn it. And I understood why.
An oversized candle looks its best the day you bring it home: perfectly full, immaculate, architectural. Begin burning it and gradually that changes. The wax disappears into the vessel, the flame falls lower, residue begins to appear and eventually the object that was chosen partly for its visual presence no longer has quite the same impact.
For a small candle, perhaps that doesn't matter. But when you have invested in something because it forms part of the interior, it feels different. It raised a question I couldn't quite let go of: Why should using a beautiful object slowly destroy the reason you fell in love with it?
The starting point was not another candle The Constance Vase didn't begin with a fragrance or a wax formulation. It started as an interiors problem. I wanted to create the presence of an XL candle without accepting the traditional life cycle of one.
Something substantial enough to style a room around. Something you could light again and again, but that would continue to look generous and full rather than gradually disappearing into itself. And perhaps most importantly, I wanted the object to matter more than what was consumed inside it.
That thinking feels increasingly relevant to where interiors are moving. For all the conversation around trends, some of the most interesting design thinking in 2026 is actually pushing against them.
Vogue has noted the return of lived-in, time-worn interiors, while designers are increasingly talking about personality, patina and rooms that feel accumulated rather than instantly decorated. There is a growing appetite for homes that reflect the people living within them rather than reproducing whatever aesthetic happens to be circulating online that month - It is a philosophy I have always believed in. Your home shouldn't need replacing every season. Neither should the objects within it.
Two years in the making. The idea sounded deceptively simple. The reality took almost two years. What began as hand drawings became prototypes, engineering conversations, measurements, revisions and months of development alongside ceramic specialists.
Because the challenge wasn't simply to make a large ceramic candle. We needed to rethink what was happening inside it. The result is our patent-pending concealed internal design: a unique structure engineered so that the candle wax sits within a carefully considered internal chamber rather than filling the entire depth of the vessel.
From the outside, the secret Vase retains the visual presence of a beautifully full XL candle. Inside, it works very differently. That internal architecture has been developed specifically for RENE, with design rights placed around the unique design alongside its patent-pending construction. There were easier ways to create a candle. But the entire point was to question whether the existing format could be better. Because the best interiors aren't disposable.
We have become accustomed to inexpensive objects entering and leaving our homes at extraordinary speed. A candle is bought, burned and its vessel discarded. Then another takes its place. And another. Individually, these decisions feel insignificant. Collectively, they represent a much bigger relationship with the things we own.
The interiors conversation is beginning to change. Recent discussion around slow interiors has challenged the idea that our homes should constantly be refreshed to follow trends, arguing instead for spaces assembled gradually through better materials, meaningful objects and purchases made with longevity in mind.
For me, that is where the idea of investment becomes important. An investment piece does not necessarily mean something precious that you are afraid to touch. Quite the opposite. It should earn its place through use. The coat that comes out every winter. The chair that moves from your first home to your next. The ceramic piece that has sat on a dining table, then a console, then beside the bath. Objects become more valuable to us when they become woven into our lives.
Our Vase was designed with that same philosophy: it may be a considered purchase, but it is one intended to remain part of your home season after season. Not another candle vessel destined for the cupboard when the wax is gone. A permanent styling object with something renewable at its centre. And then there is the flame itself, the irony is that, although so many XL candles go unlit, we still crave candlelight - Perhaps more than ever.
Our days are intensely bright, connected and overstimulated. We move between phones, laptops, offices, traffic, messages and notifications, and then wonder why we find it difficult to switch off. There is something wonderfully primitive about striking a match at the end of that kind of day. The light changes. The room changes. You do too.
I've always been interested in those details - the seemingly insignificant choices that, repeated often enough, become the texture of a life - Lighting a candle before dinner. Using the beautiful glasses rather than saving them. Putting music on while cooking. Taking ten minutes to sit somewhere without doing anything else.
The definition of luxury for a long time was closely associated with having more. I think its meaning is changing. Luxury now feels much closer to discernment. Knowing your taste well enough to stop chasing every new aesthetic. Buying the piece you truly love rather than five versions that are simply fleeting trends. Choosing something because you can imagine it in your home five years from now, not because you saw it five times on your feed this morning.
It is why the most compelling interiors rarely look as though everything arrived at once. They are collected. Layered. Personal. The Constance Vase was created to belong to that kind of home. It isn't designed to be another candle you consume and replace. It is an XL interior piece in its own right - one that happens to hold one of our oldest and simplest rituals at its centre.
It has taken two years, from the first pencil lines to engineering the internal structure and developing the ceramic form, to arrive at something that appears, intentionally, very simple - And perhaps that is the point.
The best design often hides the work that went into creating it. What remains is simply an object you want to live with.
To light. To refill. To style.
And to keep. Season after season.
