Any nice looking electric kettles?

I just have a stainless steel Black and Decker. I gave up on spending cash for small appliances after my Braun toaster broke after 6 months. Some how, toasters for $10 last 5-10 years. Braun for $100 lasts 6 months.

Really, I think the opposite. Everyone I know has an electric kettle. Stove top kettles are much more common in Europe where gas is used.

R

Here in Europe everybody uses electric kettles. And usually we do not use gas for cooking. Unless you are a chef or something and really want gas. And I seriously don’t know a single person here who uses a stovetop kettle. Well, I think my grandma did.

Naoto Fukasawa designed some pretty neat Kettles for Muji, I was always jealous of them because Muji in Europe doesn’t have them. I think they are even US exclusive together with a Naoto Fukasawa rice cooker. Don’t know how good they are though. Sometimes it is really baffeling how bad the craftsmanship of quite expensive Muji products is.

Fukasawa also made a pretty sexy kettle for his own ±0 brand, but I think that one was a few years back and Japan exclusive. So probably a collectors item by now in the west.

I thought these looked pretty slick
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Muji

Can’t get behind this kettle or the Muji toaster.

… which reminded me of this topic

my Jasper Morrison toaster broke a few years ago, so I soldered a connection back together, then when I was putting it back together I busted a button off the soldering board… just haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet.

richard: as an American, I never saw an electric kettle til I moved to Canada. Everyone here has them and no one drinks tea.

All the stuff Morrison did for Rowenta was very handsome but notorious failures as functionally reliable products. Morrison himself calls it his biggest disaster. It seems Rowenta for it’s part really botched the engineering.

@29:00

I designed a bunch last year… but I am not at that consultancy anymore so I have no idea where that project is at.
Should it be launched, I’ll update the thread :wink:

is this the stuff?

Nope, not the stuff…

That OXO is nice.

R

Richard, take this as a compliment please, but I don’t think that OXO is good enough for you!

What are you going to go with?

Still undecided. Gotta do a boiling test on electric kettle vs. Stovetop electric (why I didn’t pick induction I don’t know- no gas line or woulda done that). Haven’t seen any perfect yet…

R

Ugh… So my kettle finally died and I was forced to choose something.

The Kitchen Aid I initially thought was good was really cheap feeling in real life.

I couldn’t find anything really good so picked the Bodum one sight unseen on Amazon, because at least it was inoffesive design wise and cheap. Got it today. It’s super cheap-o plasticky feeling. It’s going back. I’d rather use a pot to boil water than waste $50 on that nonsense.

Anyone got any new ideas? Why is everything crap or decent, but only available in the UK?


Closest I can find to OK is this OXO one, but super sceptical of how the transparent part will age and get dirty/cloudy…

This kenwood also looks OK but wary of quality.

Might have to go non-electric just to avoid crap.

R

I was looking at these a year or two ago and lamenting how crappy they all are, my business partner was doing an exercise in her class to design one so I was curious what was out there. The student’s designs were for the most part so much better than anything commercially available. I did see that Branch worked on the Kickstarter with Fellows late last year: Stagg EKG | The Electric Pour-Over Kettle for Coffee Lovers by Fellow — Kickstarter

On the subject of electric vs gas cooking in Europe - in the UK it is a complete mixed bag. I don’t think I would be far off to say it is around 50:50 for cookers. In Poland and I suspect many other places in Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries they use gas exclusively as it is cheaper than electric (crazy, I know).

As for kettles, they use on top of hob kettles near exclusively in Poland also. Takes ages compared to electric but generally tastes better due to no limescale build up inside cheap plastic kettles or the plastic flavour.

I would go for premium materials and companies with decades of experience in electronic consumer goods and a sense of design, either the Bosch one or this one by Philips:

https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Kettle-HD9322-Titanium-Coffee/dp/B01JE9EQ16/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1496053716&sr=8-2&keywords=PHILIPS+kettle

The Stelton one is nice design-wise and would go well with the Stelton vacuum jug by Erik Magnussen. I got it as a gift last year and it’s a great product.

Also here in the Netherlands most people have an electric water cooker. With a good quality cooker, you can do a round of push-ups and your water is ready. The real tea drinkers have a separate corner with multiple cookers, jugs and tea+spice+honey collections. In higher income homes plastic is consciously avoided, and by occasion you see homes with more traditional oriented design, as well as around the coast and mediterranean, and they prefer the stove top cooker.

Here’s a couple from 2 companies here in Australia. I’m not such a fan of how ‘chromy’ the handles look, but overall I quite like the form of both of them. I’ve no idea if they’re available in Canada though.

^^ The Stelton one looks very nice.
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The SMEG electrical kettle is nice in a retro-esque way. Not particularly cheap though.