Fornasetti

Piero Fornasetti produced somewhere around 13,000 designs across his career, and the Milanese atelier his son Barnaba continues to run has spent decades reissuing and extending that archive. The candle line, developed from 2010, wraps that imagery around hand-decorated porcelain vessels, and the results are unlike anything else in home fragrance.

The Tema e Variazioni series, built on hundreds of variations of the face of opera singer Lina Cavalieri, is the signature. Each vessel is decorated by hand in Milan, and the larger formats are produced in strictly limited numbers. Collectors buy them as objects and often never light them at all, which tells you where the value sits.

Fragrance is the least impressive part of the proposition, competent and pleasant but not in the league of Trudon or Byredo. Burn quality is solid. But nobody buys Fornasetti primarily for the scent, and judged as decorative porcelain that also happens to be a candle, the price starts to make sense. The empty vessels retain strong resale value.