News + Trends

Why the fruit bowl is becoming the most exciting object in interior design

14/8/2026

Translation: machine translated

A bowl for fruit – sounds trivial, but it isn't. At recent design events, it became clear: hardly any everyday object is taken as seriously as this vessel. Five pieces show why.

A fruit bowl is usually the most inconspicuous item in a room. It sits there, it fills up, it gets refilled. Nobody thinks much about it. But at the last furniture fairs in Milan, Copenhagen or Lausanne, I saw that this year exactly the opposite is happening: Young studios and workshops are treating the vessel like a sculpture – made of clay, marble or wood, often in limited editions or handmade.

There's also a practical reason for this: bananas, citrus fruits, avocados and onions are not meant to be stored in the refrigerator, as I already wrote in an earlier post. How you store them makes a difference: open, well-ventilated forms help with even ripening and reduce food waste. Five studios have drawn conclusions from this – in terms of design and craftsmanship.

More than storage

Clementine Long, with her "Wheel" wall bowl made of satin, white glazed stoneware, has chosen a shape inspired by the Ferris wheel. Eight handles hold the fruit, each piece is handcrafted from clay coils, making it unique. Mounted on the wall, the bowl also doesn't take up a single centimeter of counter space.

Gus Studio from Lausanne, founded by Lucile Conti, presents "Halo", an oval, bulbous ceramic bowl that consciously oscillates between sculpture and function with its simple opening. It was created as part of a competition by the Lausanne Design Days: ceramists and designers were invited to design objects for the Le Clay Hotel – a new design hotel in the heart of the Lavaux vineyards, which will open in 2027 and house its own ceramic studio. Behind the competition is Ferus, the hotel's branding agency, which initiated the collaboration with the Design Days. "Halo" was selected as one of four projects.

Renaud de Francesco, on the other hand, conceived his "Circuit" bowl: inspired by marble runs, made of oak or maple wood, manufactured in sheltered workshops in Switzerland. The design has a practical core: the grooves keep the fruits at a distance. They don't touch each other, ripen slower and last longer.

It gets more sculptural with Vincent Kohler: His large wooden object called "Banana Split" is reduced to a single, almost whimsical gesture. Not an everyday object in the classic sense, but a good example of how far the fruit bowl theme can move away from pure function.

At the other end of the spectrum is "Skala" by Cristallina Design, developed in collaboration with ECAL/MAS Design for Luxury and Craftsmanship and Switzerland's only marble quarry at over 1200 meters in Ticino. Designer Murilo Weitz designed the bowl from millions of years old marble, originally from fossilized sea corals. This gives the bowl an unexpected depth despite its austerity.

A trend with substance

What these five objects have in common is more than just their appearance: open forms made of glass, metal, ceramic or marble allow fruit to breathe from all sides, instead of being enclosed in a closed bowl. This allows it to ripen more evenly – a side effect that further justifies the sculptural claim of these pieces.

You don't have to travel to Copenhagen or Milan to bring a piece of this thinking home. Because: such designs are also available here.