Executive Summary & Key Takeaways
- Post-technical domestic design prioritizes symbolic and relational density over pure utility. Fireplaces persist because they gather attention, making occupants face each other instead of digital screens.
- Designing focal points shapes social geometry. The hearth acts as a directional threshold, determining where a room center is and how people move within the space.
- Integrating material memory adds narrative depth to objects. Using traditional textiles and natural marbles creates physical consequences that reactivate raw materials in modern spaces.
CAMINI. Domestic Presences in the Post-Technical Era 18 – 26 April 2026 · Spazio Vito Nesta, Via Ferrante Aporti 16, Milan Curated by Paolo Casicci
There is a specific moment in a design process when a brief stops being a brief and becomes a question worth spending months on.
For NINE associati and the studio, that moment came when we asked ourselves: what does a hearth actually do in a contemporary home? Not functionally. Relationally.
In an era where warmth is programmable and light is ambient by default, the fireplace has lost its functional justification. What remains is something harder to define and more interesting to design: the fire as a social device. A presence that gathers, that changes the quality of attention in a room, that makes people face each other rather than a screen.
That question became two projects.
ÌSTÀI — for Abitzai and Mariantonia Urru
The brief asked for a contemporary reinterpretation of the hearth. The answer we arrived at was not an object but a threshold: a domestic instrument capable of activating temporary communities and constructing new forms of intimacy.
ÌSTÀI doesn’t heat a room. It changes the social geometry of one. The design logic operates on proportion, on the relationship between the flame source and the surrounding space, on the idea that a focal point is not decorative — it is directional. It tells a room where its center is.
The collaboration with Abitzai and the textile heritage of Mariantonia Urru added a layer of material memory to the project: the idea that warmth, in Sardinian domestic culture, has always been both physical and narrative. A story told around something burning.
PYRHYLITH — for Centro Italia Marmi
The second project operates on a different register. Where ÌSTÀI works with social space, PYRHYLITH works with material time.
Marble is a geological record. Every vein is a compressed event — pressure, heat, mineral migration across millennia. The flame, in PYRHYLITH, doesn’t simply inhabit the object. It reactivates it. The heat creates micro-variations in surface temperature that shift the light absorption of the stone, making the material visually alive in a way that no static finish can replicate.
The result is an object that changes continuously in the presence of fire. Not a metaphor. A physical consequence of material science applied with intention.
The collaboration with Centro Italia Marmi made this possible: the stone selection and finishing specification were integral to the design, not downstream decisions.
Why This Exhibition Matters
CAMINI is curated around a precise cultural thesis: that in the post-technical era — where every domestic function has been digitized, optimized, and made invisible — the objects that survive are the ones with symbolic and relational density.
The hearth is one of the oldest human technologies. Its persistence in contemporary interiors is not nostalgia. It is evidence that some human needs are not solvable by efficiency.
Both projects start from this premise and arrive at different formal conclusions. Together, they form a conversation about what design can do when the brief is not about function but about meaning.
CAMINI. Domestic Presences in the Post-Technical Era 18 – 26 April 2026 Spazio Vito Nesta, Via Ferrante Aporti 16, Milan Curated by Paolo Casicci
A project by NINE associati in collaboration with Marco De Masi.
If you are in Milan during Design Week, the exhibition is open daily. For studio inquiries related to this project or similar work in furniture and product design, start a conversation.