Believe it or not, Jason Miller’s a candle guy. Not to knock the chandelier that made him famous — or Roll & Hill, the eagerly anticipated lighting company he’ll launch this May — but there are times when the gentle glow of an incandescent filament just doesn’t compare to the real thing. After he renovated his new Brooklyn apartment last year, installing a carpeted conversation pit in the middle of the living room, Miller bought an armful of tapers and pillars from a shop in Woodstock and grouped them together on windowsills and side tables. It wasn’t long before he decided they needed their own purpose-built perch. “There was some clay sitting around the studio that was getting old, so I just coiled it up and glazed it,” he recalls. “It’s a method of making pots that you learn in kindergarten.”

Many of Miller’s designs start the same way — he needs something, he designs it for himself, it eventually becomes a product. He loves living with his own work. He carved out the graffiti atop his I Was Here table when he had no furniture in his old place; in his new one, an Antler lamp illuminates the bedroom while his Duct Tape chair is pretty much the only seat in the place with legs. Even the three-tiered candle atop the stand in the photo above is his creation. “It looks like hockey pucks right now, but it’s actually modular,” he says. “The idea is to be able to make giant candles using smaller pieces and stacking them up; as the top wick burns down, it lights the one below it. It’s something I’ll be developing this year.” As for the candle stand itself, though it will probably never be for sale — at least not in this form — Miller reports it a success. “It catches the wax,” he notes.