The Alessi Factory

   the alessi factory   24.02.2017

I spent February 6th at the Alessi factory in Crusinallo near Lake Orta, north of Milan. Alessi was founded in 1921 but it was in the early 1970s that the company headed down its extremely successful current path of collaborating with external designers, artists and architects. This idea was the brainchild of the current head of the company, Alberto Alessi (pictured above), who was my host at Crusinallo.

My day included touring the factory floor, the packing room, the design office, the prototype workshop and the prototype museum. The museum houses over 25,000 prototypes including early iterations of all of Alessi most famous objects along with prototypes for unreleased products such as Salvador Dali’s surrealist stainless steel bread basket with comb and clothes peg (see above).

I’ve been dealing with Alessi products for over ten years and know quite a lot about the company, its products and its history, but this visit made me realise just how important the company is to the design world. The Alessi catalogue is enormous with over 1500 products currently in production, with thousands more having been produced over the last 96 years. I’ve always gravitated more towards the sleek minimalism of Alessi’s higher end Officina range rather than its postmodern (and to be honest sometimes kitsch) plastic products, but talking with Alberto it became clearer to me why it is that the company pursues such diverse ideas of design. Alberto sees his (and the company’s) role as facilitating and refining the ideas of designers from a broad variety of perspectives.

As he writes in his book “The DreamFactory”…

“…our interpretation of design as a comprehensive creative discipline with an artistic and poetic matrix has led us away from these dogmatic assertions that purport to lay down hard and fast rules about what design should be. Who can claim the right to determine how a poem should be written or a song composed? …the transgression of the rules is a hallmark of Italian design.”

Essentially the company sees diversity in design to be as important as “good design”.

Alessi has a playful and inclusive view of a design world which often takes itself just a little too seriously.

I like that.

To see our range of Alessi products go here

Pat Coppel