At its deepest, the task of design is to provide safety and comfort, to help a person experience a sense of self, and to encourage healthy communities. Those are long term goals, in some cases spanning generations, and they ask for a slow and enduring strategy rather than a quick effect.

Adagio is an Italian word for slow and unhurried. It is a contraction of ad agio, which means at ease, and since the middle of the 1700s it has been the musical instruction for a slow tempo. The face keeps to that. It gives you nothing to count with: no numerals, no minute marks around the edge, only a small hole at each quarter. There is no scale here to measure yourself against.

Good design works with time rather than against it. A piece should connect with the person who uses it and evolve with them, and beyond that, help us connect with the passing of time itself, in synch with the days and the seasons, present and aware of the finite nature of existence. Anything made to serve the style of one short moment becomes a relic once its novelty runs out.

A clock is usually the object in a room that hurries you. This one works the other way. You take the hour from the angle the hands make across the stone, enough to know where you stand in the day, and the face offers no figures to be counted. The second hand slides rather than jumps, so there is no tick to keep pace with.

Nature moves in cycles of growth and decay, and a great deal of design tries to freeze time instead. Ageless planes of engineered glass fixed into steel grids possess none of the characteristics of nature, and on close inspection the body senses something is awry. Something truer is suggested by a humble stone plinth, unearthed from the deep, speckled by ancient sediments. We sense the age of the earth, and we take comfort in knowing we are part of something greater than ourselves.

Travertine is limestone that forms slowly, where mineral water lays the stone down over thousands of years. The small hollows across the face are pockets where water and air were caught while it was setting. Each disc is cut from natural stone, so the veining and the pattern of hollows differ from one to the next.

Designing with natural materials is akin to embracing the very notion of time. They evolved to withstand the elements, so they endure, but nothing in nature is imperishable. They age beautifully, developing a patina, the soft sheen and darkening a surface takes on with use, and that patina tells the story of days, years and decades of exposure. We find comfort in objects that have a history, objects that tell us how old they are and what they know: a brass door handle shining with the ins and outs of countless hands.

Here the materials are few: travertine at the face, porous and open at the surface, and walnut toned wood for the hour and minute hands. The second hand and the spindle at the center keep to the same brown.

A room is for living in, and a chair is for resting in. When an object exists for the ego of its maker, loudly demanding attention or complicating its function, it is neither used well nor loved. Modern life is complex and at times harried, and everything around us takes a little energy. The most enduring things are simple in expression and practical in use: simplicity, function, quality and quiet beauty.

With the lamp off, the wall holds a disc of stone with three hands. Nothing about it looks like a lamp. With the lamp on, the light stays on the wall around the disc rather than reaching out into the room: the room is no brighter, and only that patch of wall turns warm. You read the time from it by day, and switch it on at night.

We spend most of our time indoors. The story of our lives unfolds between the walls of home, our place of sanctuary, and just like the weather, the atmosphere of those rooms has a profound effect on how we rest, think and feel. Objects kept in plain sight carry part of that. What stands on a mantelpiece works as an identity signifier, a portrait of its owner.

Most walls in a house hold something that went up years ago and stopped being looked at. It is still there, and everyone who walks in still sees it. Take it down, put something else there, and the room feels different the next morning, with nothing repainted and nothing moved. A clock earns its place through the day. A light earns its place after dark. Adagio is both: the same spot on the wall tells you the time at breakfast, and after dark it carries a warm ring of light.

The end of the year is when a house takes people in: family in the hallway, coats over the backs of chairs. That is a good time to look again at the wall they will all be standing under. It travels well as a gift, too. A clock sits more easily with another person's taste than art on the wall does, and import duties are settled before the parcel reaches their door.

Adagio was designed by Manuela Guidarini, architect and artist at The Soft Minimal. She was born in Italy in 1986 and lives in Copenhagen, where she has spent more than ten years on interior layout design and artistic canvas work with design firms in the city. In her own words: "Art is something that saved my life. I explore my creativity as a natural way to communicate my emotions and induce a state of calmness and stillness in the viewer."

A clock without numerals is that instinct applied to an ordinary object. The information came off the face one layer at a time, until what was left was stone, the hands and four round holes.