Every so often a form arrives that asks to be looked at from every angle. The Helix Vase is one of those objects — a piece that takes the quiet, upright calm of our Forma Collection and sets it turning. Where much of our work stays deliberately still, the Helix introduces movement: a slow spiral that climbs its full 320mm height, catching light differently as you move around the room.
This post isn't really about buying a vase. It's about the thinking behind the twist, the material it's printed from, and a few honest ideas for living with it once it's on your shelf.
The design thinking: organic movement, structural restraint
The Helix sits at an interesting intersection. Its silhouette borrows from organic forms — the coil of a shell, the turn of a stem reaching toward light — but its discipline comes from somewhere more architectural. There's a clear thread of Bauhaus thinking in the way the vase refuses decoration for its own sake.
The Bauhaus movement is often distilled into a handful of ideas that still shape how objects are made today. As one design study describes it, the school emphasised functionalism, so that each element serves a specific purpose, alongside a simplicity built on clean lines and minimal ornamentation. The Helix's spiral isn't applied on top of the form — it is the form. The twist gives the walls their strength and the object its presence at the same time. That's a very Japandi idea, too: the meeting point between Scandinavian usefulness and Japanese quiet, where beauty and function are the same gesture.
Why plant-based PLA, and why print to order
The Helix is printed in plant-based PLA — a bioplastic derived from renewable crops rather than petroleum. It's part of a wider shift in materials science toward feedstocks that don't come out of the ground as oil. Research on starch-based bioplastics notes that starch is a cost-effective and renewable raw material, naturally abundant across many plants — from corn and wheat to tapioca and potato — offering a viable alternative to conventional petroleum-based plastics.
Just as important as the material is how we make each piece. The Helix is printed to order in roughly three days, rather than produced in bulk and stored. That single decision changes the maths of waste:
- Almost nothing is thrown away. Additive manufacturing lays down only the material the object needs, so there's no offcut, no carving away of excess.
- No dead stock. We don't overproduce shelves of vases hoping they'll sell. Yours is made because you asked for it.
- Made close to home. Printing on demand in our Australian studio keeps the process transparent and local.
If the broader philosophy behind this interests you, we've written more on our about page about why we design this way.
Styling the Helix
At 320mm tall and 110mm in diameter, the Helix has enough scale to anchor a surface on its own. It's genuinely happy empty — the spiral does the work, and there's something restful about a sculptural object that doesn't need to hold anything to justify its place.
When you do want to fill it, our instinct is dried stems. The Helix is designed with them in mind, and dried material suits the vase's calm, long-lived character. There's a practical charm to this too: as one Australian flower studio points out, unlike fresh flowers that wilt within a week or two, dried flowers can last for a year or even longer. A few tips:
- Go tall and loose. Let a few dramatic stems — pampas, bunny tail, dried eucalyptus — echo the vase's vertical lift rather than crowding it.
- Odd numbers, uneven heights. Three or five stems at varying lengths read more naturally than a dense, level bunch.
- Fresh flowers? Add a glass liner. Slip a slim glass insert inside to hold water and protect the PLA, then treat it like any other fresh arrangement.
Living with a made-to-order object
Keep the Helix out of prolonged direct heat — a sunny windowsill in an Australian summer is the one place PLA would rather not sit. A soft, dry cloth is all it needs for dust. Beyond that, it asks very little, which is rather the point.
If the Helix speaks to you but you're drawn to something softer, the Wavy Flower Vase explores the same interest in movement with a gentler, rippling line. Either way, the idea is the same one we keep returning to: fewer, better objects, made only when they're wanted, from materials that give more than they take.