Alessi’s 9090 coffee maker takes flight to Venice

The Grand Canal froze over in imagination when Alessi installed a colossal snow sculpture of Richard Sapper’s 9090 kettle on the icy waterfront, transforming the Renaissance facades and moored gondolas into the backdrop for an act of pure sculptural fancy. The form, unmistakable in its modernist geometry and burnished spout, rose from the Venetian quay with the texture of freshly fallen snow clinging to its surface, its cylindrical body and elegant handle rendered in white and weathered ice.

Sapper’s kettle, designed in 1978, has become one of the most recognizable objects in contemporary design: a teapot that sings when water reaches boiling point, a small marvel of engineering that makes ordinary mornings feel ceremonial. The object belongs to kitchens across the world, yet here, enlarged and ephemeral, it became something else entirely. A moment of deliberate whimsy. A reminder that even the most functional of things can hold wonder when scale and context shift.

The sculpture carried playful notes. In another rendition, the kettle wore a red scarf knotted at its neck, tiny sticks for arms emerging from the body, a coal eye drawn on in deliberate irreverence. The design house’s message was clear: the boundary between the functional and the fanciful dissolves when imagination takes hold. The coffee ritual, compressed into the time it takes to brew, becomes an escape, a gondola ride through snow, a holiday not from place but from the ordinary.

The installation captures the essence of Alessi’s philosophy: objects are not merely things, but gateways to dreams. In Venice, on snow that would eventually melt into memory, the 9090 stood as evidence that design, when touched by imagination, invites us to see the familiar anew.

Imagery courtesy of Alessi (@alessi_official).