Copco · founded 1960

Copco: from a kettle to a cabinet

Nineteen sixty

Copco began in 1960 as a company built on enameled cookware. Early in that decade the catalog gained a stove-top kettle of pressed steel and porcelain enamel, with a handle of bent teak arching above the lid, and it went on to become a recognized emblem of its decade's design. The colours were bright and unapologetic. One absence defined it as much as anything present: no whistle. The kettle did not announce itself. You stayed near the stove, watched the steam, and poured when it was time.

We make no grand claims about that object, because it made none about itself. It was a kettle that heated water, lasted, and looked like nothing else on the stove. That was the whole argument, and it turned out to be enough.

What the kettle taught

The kettle settled a question of priorities that we have never reopened: the daily object deserves the design attention, precisely because it is daily. A thing handled twice a day earns its materials. Enamel that wipes clean after years of hard water is worth more than a feature list. A handle shaped for the hand that actually lifts it beats an ornament every time.

It also taught restraint. A kettle without a whistle asks something of its owner, and trusts them with it. We still build to that assumption: tools should suit the person using them, not shout over the household.

The same brief, indoors

Somewhere along the way the stovetop gave way to the cabinet interior as the place we could be most useful. Storage turns out to run on the same brief as boiling water: a daily act, done half-awake, that goes better when the object was designed by somebody who pictured it. The deep corner where your reach gives out, the shelf that hides its own back row, the drawer that is one country of spoons: each is the kind of small daily friction the kettle was built against.

So the turntables carry a non-skid surface on the tray, and a base that stays planted while the tray turns. The riser steps take the same treatment, which is why a jar set down at an angle stays set down. Clear plastic entered the range where seeing the contents is the entire point, bamboo where a counter wants something warmer, and steel and beechwood where a tool has to outlast its owner's enthusiasm for it.

What we make now

The working core of the range goes inside things: lazy susan turntables from 9 to 18 inches, including the tall under-sink model cut to stand beside the plumbing; spice racks and shelf risers; drawer and wrap organizers; fridge bins and airtight canisters. The rest of it leaves the house with you: the 16-ounce Acadia travel mugs and their desk-mug cousins, water bottles, and the small steel and beechwood tools that live by the sink.

Copco today is part of a larger housewares family, and the founding year is the one figure about ourselves we print. Everything else on these pages is a figure about a product, which is where we think the figures belong.

The whole of the Copco catalog is laid out by shelf from the front page, with the diameter, the capacity and the pack count printed on every card.

What you can rely on

You can rely on a short list here. The diameters, capacities, tier counts and pack counts on our cards come from our product data, not from memory. The photographs are checked against the piece they claim to show before they go up. Prices move, and where a figure here disagrees with the one at the checkout, the checkout wins. That is the full promise, and the products are built to make it enough.