The Cafetière – A Refill
Calimani and Moneta’s design was further enhanced by adding a metal or rubber edge on the filter, effectively what we now know as the plunger spirals. A French kitchen equipment manufacturer, Melior, adopted their design to launch the Melior Coffee Pot in 1933. The pots made their way to Britain, appearing in the Army and Navy Stores catalogue from 1935, promising purchasers a method of brewing coffee as easy as making tea. Silver-plated, they sold in three sizes, four, six, and eight cups at 14/6, 17/6, and 21 shillings respectively.
A further refinement to the mechanics of a cafetière was made in 1936 by Italian designer, Gemma Barelli Moreta, who fitted a spring around a metal disk that sat above the filter, producing a much tighter seal. This was incorporated into the Melior design, which was now classically simple with an elegant art deco Bakelite handle, a statement piece on any upper-middle class table. Melior also produced ceramic cafetières in green, brown, blue mist, and gold and later, in the early 1950s, with glass containers.
Swiss-Italian designer, Faliero Bondanini, revolutionised the design of the cafetière, giving its iconic look of glass container, domed steel lid, and metal plunger. His design, which he patented in 1958, ensured that the device was much easier to clean, had a much better filter fit, trapping the sediment at the bottom, and a sieve to prevent the grounds from being poured into the cup. Melior adopted Bandanini’s design, marketing it as a Chambord, a name possibly derived from the roofline of the Château de Chambord.
By this time Melior was part of the larger SAE Martin group who took responsibility for distributing the Chambord around Europe, including Britain where they were sold by Fortnum & Mason for £3 2s 7d. During the 1960s it slowly became a household name in Europe, its desirability heightened when Michael Caine used one in the 1965 film, The Ipcress File.
Britain, though, proved a harder nut to crack. A major investor in SAE Martin, James de Viel Castel, used his Holywell-based company in North Wales, Household Articles Ltd, to produce a cafetière for the British market, similar but not identical in design to the Chambord. Known as La cafetière, it was launched in 1969.
Positioned as a high-end, aspirational product, it was stocked at John Lewis, Harrods, Selfridges, Fortnum and Mason and advertised in Country Life. The advertisements stressed the similarity to making tea and implied a touch of continental sophistication by “making coffee as the French do”. They hedged their bets by pointing out it could be made to use tea too, a smart move as Britain was still predominantly a nation of tea drinkers.
For those who baulked at paying £6 15s for a standard chrome plated La cafetière or £9 12s for the gold-plated model, there was another way to get their nicotine-stained hands on one. Embassy included them in their cigarette coupon catalogues in the early 1970s. It was not until 1990 that Argos began to offer an eight-cup model in their catalogues in 1990, priced at £38.50.
In 1991 the Danish company, Bodum Holdings, who were the distributors of cafetières in Denmark, bought the rights to the Chambord name from SAE Martin. Under their direction Bodum Chambord quickly became a symbol of excellence, a high-quality state-of-the-art coffee maker. Household Articles were allowed to retain the right to sell them.
With the growth of consumerism in 1990s Britain and a desire to explore new products and to eschew convenience for quality, the cafetière finally came into its own. Today it is the most used brewing device in the United Kingdom, even if, as recently 2012, 65% of the respondents to a Nespresso survey claimed they were too complicated to use.
After its battle for acceptance, the cafetière seems to be here to stay.
