PHILIPPE STARCK’S
LEMON SQUEEZER

Because, as everyone knows, lemon squeezers are always at the bottom of the drawers! But not the one created by Philippe Starck for the Italian design brand Alessi. That one is quite the opposite.

A funny revolution in the kitchen! It shows off and sits enthroned on the worktop, even if some say it is not really effective in its function of squeezing the said lemons… In any case, it struts about and does not hide its shiny muscles of an athlete who might have taken some extraterrestrial medications. Because avant-garde imp or spider perched on its three long legs, modeled in gleaming cast aluminum, it measures nearly 30 centimeters in height. A colossus, in a way, which even ended up becoming a precious decorative object, a sculpture and even the chicest coat rack!

And when it comes to the wallet, it delivers: It costs (only) 75 euros, seems to last a lifetime and more, and undoubtedly represents Alessi’s best-seller since more than 2 million copies have been sold since its release in 1990; and about 50,000 more are sold each year.

Such a success, inevitably, gets people talking… And, some still wonder if it wasn’t rather a butter dish or a tray that the Alessi brand had ordered from the French designer? So many stories are told about this lemon squeezer. Just the other day, a friend told me it had given rise to as many mysteries as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa!

Maybe that’s pushing it a bit! But such a comparison would displease neither our French design star nor all those who venerate this everyday object as an icon. Better yet, as a work of art. Moreover, it is exhibited in many museums around the world. Including – but this goes without saying – in that of the foundry created in 1921 by Giovanni Alessi and his brother, in the small town of Omegna, in the Piedmont region, a hundred kilometers from Milan.

It is also said, and this seems closer to reality, that at the end of the 80s, Alberto Alessi supposedly asked six designers including Philippe Starck to create an everyday object. That summer, the designer was in Italy and having lunch in a restaurant on the Amalfi Coast, enjoying a plate of squid. But since he never allows himself any respite to think, imagine, dream and draw, there he is thinking again about the order… But well, well, there’s a lack of lemon on the plate or – and this is another story – it’s while squeezing the lemon that in two or three pencil strokes, he sketches on the tablecloth the outlines of a possible lemon squeezer! This drawing is now in the archives of the Alessi museum.

What is less said is that the alliance between Starck and Alessi is not just an ordinary alliance between a publisher and a designer. It is a duo of poets. Well, I’m saying it! Because one, a genius inventor, is certainly a poet. The other, an entertainer of the table, is an industrialist who would have liked to be at the head of an art gallery. So to nevertheless perpetuate the legacy of the family foundry’s workshops, he had this bright idea to create unique works of art even though mass-produced. This is the whole wonderful paradox.

For the second, “the aesthetic and poetic values of an object are the surest trigger for purchase”, and the market being “a mule head that always wants to be surprised, it is by creativity, not by marketing”. Take that! Besides, doesn’t Starck call Alessi “the merchant of happiness”? And what more could we ask of our everyday objects than to bring us happiness?