When we speak of artefacts, we refer to objects that do not arise spontaneously from the natural world but take shape through intention: a need to be met, a gesture to be facilitated, an aesthetic idea to be made tangible. Every artefact carries a cultural imprint, because its materials and forms encapsulate techniques, symbols, and social habits.

Among these, the candlestick is one of the most enduring and widespread examples. Created to support a flame, a primary necessity for centuries, it has moved through history by continually shifting roles and meanings: from technical tool to ritual object, from status symbol to decorative element, eventually becoming an identity-bearing accessory of the contemporary home. When the candle was once indispensable for extending daily activities after dusk, the candlestick served as its material infrastructure: it ensured stability, safety, and portability. With the arrival of electricity, this practical function disappeared, yet the object remained. It lost its technical centrality but gained a new symbolic one.

“When an object outlives its function, what remains is culture. The candlestick is a reminder that ritual survives technology.”

— Dr. Elena Marburg, Sociologist of Material Culture

Today we light a candle not to brighten a space, but to transform it: to shape an atmosphere, mark a gesture, create a moment of pause. This cultural shift has turned the candlestick into fertile ground for design, a small formal system in which contemporary languages can be explored. The twentieth century accelerated this transformation. On one hand, it stripped away superfluous ornament and religious iconography; on the other, it introduced a more rational, structured, and modular aesthetic. The candlestick became lighter, more open, more adaptable. A composable object aligned with the geometries of modern domestic architecture.

It was in this context that, in the 1960s, the project of Hans Nagel and Werner Stoff took shape. A project that not only modernized the candlestick but reimagined it as a system; an object capable of growing, aggregating, and transforming. STOFF Nagel continues to carry this intuition forward. It has revived the essence of a millennia-old artefact without freezing it in nostalgia, translating it instead into a contemporary visual language. Its modular candlestick and the recent reissue of the Quist model from the 1970s demonstrates how design can maintain a vital dialogue with history: not by replicating it, but by extending, reinterpreting, and integrating it into our current ways of living with objects. 

“The Quist reminds us that simplicity can be radical. Three arms, three flames — infinite possibilities.”

The Quist’s form is immediate: three arms, three flames, a balanced geometry yet far from simplistic: it is a small spatial “node,” a point of aggregation capable of drawing the eye. Relaunching it today shows how fertile this archetype still is. It preserves the stability and symmetry of traditional candlesticks while translating them into a contemporary visual grammar, defined by metallic surfaces, calibrated weights, and a silhouette that resonates with modernist interiors as well as more eclectic and post-digital environments.

Objects like STOFF Nagel’s Quist are therefore not merely aesthetic reinterpretations but cultural devices: they remind us that even what is no longer necessary can continue to be meaningful. They prompt us to reflect on the kinds of relationships we wish to cultivate with the objects that inhabit our homes; not just tools, but quiet companions in our daily rituals.

The question that remains open is deceptively simple: in an age determined to simplify and dematerialize everything, why do we still feel the need for an object so concrete, so archaic, and so deliberately slow? Perhaps the answer lies not in the object itself, but in what we have become or in what, through these artefacts, we are trying to reclaim.