From a metalworking workshop in Omegna to a design company shaped by international collaborations, Alessi has made domestic objects a meeting place for craft, industry and visual ideas.
Omegna and the metal workshop
Alessi began in 1921 as Fratelli Alessi Omegna, a workshop with a foundry founded by Giovanni Alessi and his brother. Its first objects were made from brass, nickel silver and copper, with finishes including nickel, chrome and silver. That starting point in housewares and metalworking remains an important frame for the company’s later design collaborations.1
From professional tools to the home
The company’s production changed with its materials and audiences. In the 1950s it moved from softer metals toward stainless steel and developed objects for hotels, restaurants and bars. During the following decade, Alessi added home objects that reinterpreted traditional silverware styles in polished and satin-finish steel. The shift joined industrial production to a domestic vocabulary.1
A design factory takes shape
When Alberto Alessi joined the firm in 1970, he developed projects that treated useful objects as carriers of art and poetry, including Alessi d’Après, which involved Salvador Dalí. Collaborations with Ettore Sottsass, Richard Sapper, Achille Castiglioni and Alessandro Mendini then helped form the company’s idea of a “Factory of Design”: a house built around exchanges with designers, not a single signature style.1
The essentials
- Founded
- 1921, Omegna
- Headquarters
- Omegna, Italy
- Official site
- alessi.com
