Hot Bertaa kettle was in production for seven years until its Italian design company Alessi withdrew it from their range of designer kitchenware with Alberto Alessi referring to the design as “our most beautiful fiasco”.
Well designed objects incorporate both utility and art but too much emphasis on one or the other increases the risk of product failure from too much emphasis on one side or the other.
Does it matter that Starck's efforts at boiling water with a sense of panache came to grief in the practicality stakes? Well if you bought a Bertaa just for boiling water then it was a failure.
Bertaa provided no visual clue to the water level and the handle was arranged in such a way that you were at risk of burning your fingers on the aluminium body. The plastic resin spout was subject to spilling boiling water in the act of pouring, and had a tendency to release a jet of hot steam towards the user.
But that fact that a piece of basic kitchen utility is now so well represented in museums around the world and so much talked about more than three decades after its inception is testament to its value as an art piece.
At my occasional periI I choose my coffee makers and my cars by the way they look, not from the specifications. In the heydays of 12" LP's I probably wasted a lot of money purchasing less than monumental music because the jacket cover drew me in. Thankfully however that period in the history of music produced a lot of damn good record covers to go with the music that was monumental. And so we can be tricked by beauty. But we can also make the case that when we see a beautiful product it is quite likely it was designed under the creative impulse of someone who cared about quality, and that quality extended not just to the aesthetics but to the functionality and longevity of the product as well. Hot Bertaa might be the exception but might also be a hard earned lesson in the importance of combining practicality with beauty.
