Most Humidors Aren’t Designed. They’re Decorated.

Mine was about design, not a material story.

Every category has a shape everyone agrees on, right up until someone asks why.

For desktop humidors, that shape was some version of a box or bevelled edges—and for years, most of what came onto the market was a variation on that same silhouette, dressed up in a new finish. Carbon fiber here, exotic veneer there, a different lock or hinge. The underlying form rarely changed. What changed was the surface.

I remember the moment this started to bother me. Around the mid-2000s Porsche Design had released a line of humidors wrapped in Kevlar—beautifully executed, technically impressive, unmistakably Porsche. But look past the Kevlar, and the shape underneath was strikingly familiar: a safe, conventional silhouette, barely distinct from what already existed. The Davidoff Dome, by contrast, had dared to break the mold with its bold, iconic form. Porsche, for all its innovation, had simply dressed a traditional box in a new material. It was a material story, not a design story. That distinction stuck with me. I didn’t want to make a humidor that was interesting because of what it was wrapped in. I didn't want a humidor that borrowed its shape and wore a new coat. I wanted one that had never existed before.

The bold architectural curve of the Davidoff Dome stands in stark contrast to the safe, carbon-wrapped rectangle of the Porsche P'3681.

It was similar across the industry — the assumption that novelty lives on the surface. Sometimes that surface was Kevlar. Sometimes it was a golden dragon on a red box. The red was not Chinese red, and the dragon just made the offence even worse. Same shortcut, different costume: dress the old shape in something loud enough to distract from the fact that nothing underneath had been rethought.

That became my starting point with DeLight: don't decorate an existing form. Design a new one. I knew I had to dig deeper—beyond materials, beyond even cigars themselves.

Where the Shape Came From

The idea came, unexpectedly, while living in China—not from cigars at all, but from something much older: ancient Chinese coins.

The inspiration behind the DeLight humidor: traditional Chinese cash coins, where the round shape represents the heavens and the square hole represents the earth.

The DeLight — a form rethought from the ground up.

These coins are round on the outside with a square cut through the center—described traditionally as "square within, round without." The circle represents heaven; the square represents earth. Together, the coin is a small, literal object representing the union of the two—earthly material shaped into something that reaches toward the heavens.

Exclusive provenance: This Genco Berk DeLight humidor features a custom plaque marking it as Serial No. 007, specifically made for Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

That idea struck me as exactly right for a cigar humidor. Cigars are, in the most literal sense, an earthly product—tobacco, leaf, soil. But for a lot of us who smoke them, the experience they produce is something closer to heavenly pleasure—unhurried, contemplative, something you make time for rather than something you consume in passing. I felt that gap, between the earthly material and the elevated experience, deserved to be built into the object that holds them, not just implied by good marketing copy.

So DeLight became a cylinder—not a bevel, not a box, not a dome. The circular form of the coin, translated directly into the humidor's body. And on the lid, the same square-within-circle motif reappears. To recreate the illusion of the coin's central void, I placed a bronze mirror within the lid—a quiet, reflective window that captures the heaven above and the earth below, turning the humidor into a living, breathing representation of the ancient coin rather than just a decorative afterthought.

The Materials Had to Match the Idea

Once the form was set, the materials needed to reinforce the same earth-and-heaven story rather than compete with it. The lid is finished in black glossy lacquer—a quiet homage to traditional Chinese lacquerware. The body is Zebrano veneer under clear glossy lacquer, letting the wood's natural striping do the visual work rather than any applied pattern. Inside, the lining is Spanish cedar, the traditional choice for humidity control and for helping cigars mature properly during storage—function, not just finish.

A humidor designed from the inside out. The DeLight, open.

DeLight was produced as a limited edition of 300, with a small square stainless steel plaque set into the base—the same square motif, appearing one more time—engraved with a serial number and the owner's name.

What Came After

DeLight went on to be named a Front Runner in Robb Report's "21 Ultimate Gifts" in 2009, and won Product Design honors at China's Successful Design Awards in 2012. It found its way onto the set of Star Trek Into Darkness, opened the New Horizons section at the Venice Film Festival inside the Japanese film CUT—and, in a full-circle moment, now sits in Arnold Schwarzenegger's personal collection, his name engraved on the same square plaque that ties the design back to its inspiration.

Featured in Robb Report's "21 Ultimate Gifts" and on the cover of FrontRunners — an architect breaks the box mold to rethink what a humidor can be.

At the Successful Design Awards ceremony in Shanghai, 2012.

None of that was the goal when I started. The goal was simply to make sure that if I was going to design a humidor, I was actually going to design one—not borrow a shape and call the material the innovation. Everything that came after was, in a very real sense, like the coin that inspired it—a flip that happened to land the right way up.

— Genco Berk