The boundaries between interior design, luxury home décor, and the end-of-life space are beginning to blur. Alessi, the iconic Italian brand known for sleek kettles and chic lemon squeezers, is now presenting funeral urns during exhibition The (Last) Pot at Milan Design Week 2025. ⁠The idea originated during a dinner party conversation in 2010 at Alberto Alessi’s home. It began with a simple idea: how a pot becomes an urn — and how the purpose of vessels evolves over a lifetime.

Alessi’s exhibition, The (Last) Pot, is a thought-provoking showcase at Milan Design Week 2025, featuring works by leading architects and designers who have reimagined the funeral urn as a personal, cultural and design-forward object. The urns were created by 10 international designers, including Michael Anastassiades, David Chipperfield, Michele De Lucchi, EOOS, Naoto Fukasawa, Giulio Iacchetti, Audrey Large, Daniel Libeskind, Philippe Starck and Mario Tsai.

Each designer has interpreted the idea personally, creating pieces that blend aesthetics and symbolism. The resulting urns take on a variety of forms — some playful, others more contemplative. Rather than treating urns as purely functional, the collection presents them as vessels of memory, identity, and cultural expression. Designs range from house-shaped ceramics to sculptural forms like bones, books, totems, and eggs, exploring themes of home, ancestry, and eternity. The works reflect a growing cultural shift toward death positivity, embracing mortality as part of life and design.

Standout concepts include:

• EOOS’s Totem: Stackable metal urns for pets and people, representing family lineage.
• Tsai’s Book: A discreet reflective urn in a book shape that opens to reveal personal mementos (photos or letters).
• Fukasawa’s Home: A house-shaped urn that evokes warmth and the memory of  a person's final home.
• Starck’s Bone to Bone: A poetic return to life’s essence via a bone-shaped urn.
• Libeskind’s Khora: A minimal cube-in-square symbolizing immortality.

The exhibition reflects a broader societal embrace of death positivity - a movement that normalizes conversations around mortality and reclaims death as a deeply personal, cultural, and aesthetic experience. It aligns with other innovations in the death care industry, from human composting to dissolving urns and mycelium coffins, as designers increasingly apply their skills to personalize and bring meaning to the end of life. As people seek alternatives to traditional funeral practices, opportunities arise to transform objects of mourning into vessels of memory and identity.

Ultimately, The Last Pot is more than a design exhibition — it’s a cultural statement that blurs the boundaries between function, art, and remembrance. It invites us to see death not as an end, but as a continuation of life’s design narrative.

Photos by Claudia Zalla after https://www.dezeen.com/ and by https://www.starck.com