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John Meng designs ashtrays for the end of the smoking age, finding a pulse in one of the most obsolete objects in the home.
The ashtray has always had a strange place in design. Once a fixture of domestic life, hotel lounges, cafés, and boardrooms, it slowly disappeared from the center of the table. What remains is less about habit than objecthood. The best ashtrays today are no longer disposable accessories. They sit closer to small sculptures, desktop architecture, or private ritual tools: objects made for a slower gesture or a particular room.
John Meng’s Achille and Cube Study 1 belong in that category. Designed in 2025, the two cigar ashtrays approach the same brief from opposite directions. One begins with a found industrial form and changes its meaning. The other starts with pure geometry and hides its complexity inside a quiet block of wood. Meng’s route to this point has not been linear. He came to design outside the usual academic path, after a formative period in France spent studying modern classics. In 2007, he presented at SaloneSatellite in Milan as the first independent designer from China. He later showed work at the Gwangju Design Biennale, received Red Dot concept recognition, and continued to move across furniture, lighting, and domestic objects; his Sahara Chair was shortlisted for Dezeen Awards China in 2023.
Achille is the more theatrical of the two. Meng builds the piece around a professional espresso portafilter, keeping the object’s industrial character visible while giving it a new use. The steel housing is fixed to a custom pylon with a single warm-gold titanium screw, while a beechwood rod grounds the base. At the top, a welded groove holds the cigar. Below, the portafilter’s dosing cup becomes the ash chamber, and the filter basket works as a lid. The reference is clear but not heavy-handed: Achille takes its name from Achille Castiglioni and nods to the designer’s 1957 Mezzadro stool, borrowing its wit of displacement rather than its form.
Cube Study 1 is quieter. A solid sapele timber cube is milled to create a cylindrical cavity for a removable stainless-steel vessel. An inset steel cube rises from one corner, its top cut with a diagonal semi-circular groove for a cigar. For the lid, Meng uses a martensitic stainless-steel disc with a small aperture for removal; when not in use, it docks magnetically to the side of the timber body. The geometry is simple, but the details carry the piece: warm wood against polished steel, the weight of the raised corner, the hidden chamber inside the block, the small choreography of use, remove, rest, return.
Together, Achille and Cube Study 1 make a case for the ashtray as a designed object worth looking at again. It is a commercially awkward category, culturally loaded and almost unfashionable by default. That is part of what makes Meng’s approach interesting. The stigma is there, but the work moves around it rather than denying it. Achille has the energy of an espresso machine pulled apart and reassembled with a wink. Cube Study 1 has the density of a small architectural model. Neither piece tries to make the ashtray innocent again. They simply give it form, weight, and enough intelligence to remain in the room.
