Tetra, A Designer Smoking Accessories Shop

As longtime design journalists, some of our favorite stories over the years have involved people or brands bringing great design to otherwise-overlooked genres, like household tools or bathroom accessories. That impulse was part of what motivated me to start a new side project, which launched yesterday — Tetra is the first shop devoted entirely to beautiful smoking accessories like lighters, ashtrays, and incense burners, objects that have either have never before been aggregated in one place, or, more often, have been neglected by design entirely.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way — icons like Marianne Brandt, Enzo Mari, and Dieter Rams created incredibly sleek smoking accoutrements for the home in the ’50s and ’60s, and Tetra’s intent is to revive that tradition in a contemporary way. To that end, while it’s an entirely separate project from Sight Unseen, myself and my Tetra co-founders built our collection around existing and newly commissioned objects by many designers whose names you’ll recognize from these pages, such as Chen Chen and Kai Williams, Ben Medansky, Fort Standard, Helen Levi, Katie Stout, Object & Totem, and even Tom Dixon. Check out a sampling of those goods here — in images beautifully shot and styled by Tetra co-founder (and Sight Unseen contributor) Su Wu, of I’m Revolting — then head over to shop-tetra.com to see the full collection.

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