A water kettle is one of those things that is a permanent, full-time part of the visual landscape. It’s used too often to be hidden away between. Further, a stovetop kettle will occupy one burner full-time. This is the kind of object to spend money on.

Most of them, even the “designer” ones, are either too unreconsidered or too cutesy for me.

I made do patiently with a small cooking pot for years, while I searched.

Finally I found Stefano Giovanonni’s “Mami” for the stovetop.

Its lines resonated with Giordano Robbiati’s late 1940s Stovetop Espresso Machine known as “The Atomic”.

Traveling the world without the Mami, somehow it seemed prudent to get an electric one. First I had a Bosche Porsche. When it gave out I couldn’t find anything with such clean lines. After months of research I discovered the discontinued Morphy Richards Manhattan and someone in a distant Sydney suburb with one for sale under $400… It was a two hour very hot drive.

In Berlin, the Manhattan took to leaking and no one seemed interested in fixing it. I went back to boiling water in a cooking pot.

Then when looking for an attractive water filter jug to keep the calc out of the Gaggia Baby espresso machine, I discovered that Stelton had expanded the Erik Magnussen E77 range from coffee thermos to water filters and electric kettles.