I like to think that some of the coolest stuff in my kitchen could star in Fantasia — specifically, this anthropomorphic corkscrew lad and this utterly unique Bauhaus coffee pot by Alessi, the Italian design house that has been steadily populating my home over the years with all kinds of joyous tablewares, serving spoons, and moka pots. They’re the kinds of personality-forward, gift-ready items that I typically hunt down in MoMA’s gift shop or a slightly intimidating conceptual boutique in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Lo and behold, imagine my surprise when I found a treasure trove of Alessi goods on sale at… Amazon?
In case you have been living in a forested hovel (good for you, honestly), Amazon is gearing up to unleash thousands of deals for Prime Day, its annual blowout savings event that will take place from July 8–11 this year with huge markdowns on everything from home tech to pantry items. Your humble Eater shopping stewards (me) have already started sifting through the best early Amazon Prime Day deals, but Alessi’s abundance of 20-percent-off-and-above savings on postmodern sugar bowls and pepper mills dreamt up by Ettore Sottsass, founder of the Memphis design group, made me blast off a flurry of group chat texts to my fellow design-obsessed friends about the deals.
As a passionate home cook who has been collecting designer trinkets and tools for decades, I know a little Alessi can go a long way in bringing life into a kitchen. The 104-year-old design house was founded by Giovanni Alessi in northern Italy, and was dedicated from the get-go to creating relatively affordable everyday pieces that reconciled whimsical design with functionality; today, it is still a family-operated company with the designer’s grandson, Alberto Alessi, serving as president since the 1970s.
In a design landscape that is surging with rapid-fire trend cycles, Alessi relies on a stable of hundreds of postmodern designers and points of inspiration that, to paraphrase Alessi, include architecture, playfulness, and a commitment to designing only what you love. All of this is great news for me, because I live for a design house that makes me feel like I live in an elevated version of the Pee-wee’s Playhouse set.
Let’s tuck into the best early Prime Day deals from the brand.
