On the morning of my interview with Alighieri founder Rosh Mahtani, a lively debate has broken out in the British Vogue office. The subject is preparing a weekday dinner at home, and the ritualistic flourishes the team turns to once they’ve finished with their nine-to-five (and beyond). One editor waxes lyrical about the importance of enjoying a “full meal”, starting perhaps with olives, and finishing with fruit and chocolate. At the other end of the desk, a colleague talks wistfully of observing the dining table of her neighbors through the window, laid each evening with mood-setting candles. Cue melancholic sighs around the office, as other members of the team fantasize about being the kind of people who make time for an elaborate dinner on a Monday, instead of attempting to clear their inboxes while scoffing a Deliveroo or cobbling together a girl dinner.
It’s a serendipitous conversation considering Mahtani and I are meeting to discuss the launch of Alighieri Casa, her Hatton Garden-based jewellery brand’s debut homeware collection, and a project that has been deeply embedded in the founder’s mind since she launched her label a decade ago. When Mahtani first began creating the prototypes that would form her molten, tactile designs—like medallions and vessel pendants inspired by the epic storytelling in Dante’s The Divine Comedy—she would sit at her mother’s kitchen table and begin to carve shapes instinctively into wax. “The ritual of lighting a candle has always felt like something really spiritual to me,” Mahtani says. “My grandparents followed the rituals of Hinduism and once everyone in our family had come home, they’d light a candle on a prayer tray and that always felt special.”
For Mahtani, wearing jewellery feels ceremonially akin to setting a table, or lighting a candle while taking a bath. “Those rituals are like putting on an Alighieri Lion Medallion necklace in the morning for strength and courage, or taking off your jewelry at the end of the day and placing it on a counter,” she says. Alighieri Casa’s debut collection includes pebble-shape candlestick holders, curvaceous cutlery sets inspired by hulks of rock and tribal hunting tools, bottle openers in the shape of sea creatures, and small dishes that resemble liquid shards of gold. “The cutlery took the longest to develop,” Mahtani says of pieces that are sand-cast in brass and forged in stainless steel. “Those prototypes have been sitting with me for the last five years. I love the pieces because they look very prehistoric.” She laughs: “They’re really fun to hold… almost like a baby soother.”
“I really want to invite people to create rituals for themselves, because it’s a tough world out there,” says Mahtani of her desire to invite her customers to create measured and mood-boosting moments in their day. She particularly loves the idea of people using her cutlery to serve a communal Italian meal, where “nothing feels formal, and where opulent pieces are used to enjoy more everyday sharing food.” It’s a self-care-centered, considered pace that Mahtani has increasingly applied to her own business too. In the summer of 2023, the designer silenced her emails for three weeks, and challenged her buyers by not presenting a collection the following September. As we speak, Mahtani has just returned from a holiday in Greece, where her Alighieri Casa pieces took on a traveling totemic power. Mahtani tied a black cord around her seahorse bottle opener—a piece she associates with drinking a cold soda from a glass bottle by a swimming pool—and wore it around her neck. She also insisted on eating a Grecian take on a tiramisu in a taverna using a prototype of a small dessert spoon she had in her handbag.
Mahtani hopes that people will pass down her homeware pieces, like heirlooms, in the same way that sentimental jewelry is also passed down through generations. “Often a necklace is handed down in the same way a recipe is… I think cutlery is a great way to celebrate those two worlds colliding. It’s an homage to generational storytelling.”
For Mahtani, Alighieri Casa—the culmination of a decade’s worth of imagination and creative endeavor—is a sand-cast symbol of perseverance. “We turned 10 this year, and we have had so many ups and downs as a business, it’s not a simple or easy thing to run,” she reflects. “The collection feels emblematic of what it takes to build a home: it takes time, brick by brick, and this collection really is about that journey.”