Alessi is a contemporary design juggernaut founded near Italy’s Lake Orta in 1921. By the 1950s the Alessi family was specialising in stainless steel manufacturing and today its products are sold in over 5000 outlets in over 60 countries. Since the 1970s the company has pursued a strategy of collaborating with well known architects and designers such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Many of the resulting products have made their way into the permanent collections of the world’s great design museums.