At the beginning of 1992, Alberto Alessi asked me to design a kettle. I told him that he already had many in his catalogue: the magnificent one by Richard Sapper, the one by Aldo Rossi, the one by Frank Gehry, the one by Philippe Stark and the one by Michael Graves, which was sweeping the market. Alberto told me that they were all selling very well and that he wanted to expand the collection with other of his favourite designers.

I set to work. Doing something original at that point seemed very difficult to me. Graves had had the very fortunate idea of ​​having the little bird at the tip of the spout whistle when the water was boiling. I wondered if it was possible that, in addition to a sound, there was a visual manifestation of the boiling. A bollitore for the deaf, really. It occurred to me that the steam would turn a mill: from here, being Spanish, the reference to Don Quixote was obvious and I decided to call it Sancho to make it less pretentious. Alberto had a lot of fun, we made a first model in the studio, Alessi made several prototypes in which we got to test the sound and the movement of the blades, everything worked perfect and we were very excited, but suddenly, the multitude of kettles in the catalogue saturated the market and the company decided not to launch more models until years later.

Project not carried out.