AROUND HOME : Chemex Coffee Makers
MACY’S HOUSEWARES BUYER: “That’s not a coffee maker--it doesn’t look like one.”
Peter Schlumbohm: “Why don’t you take it home and try it?”
Thus, in 1942, was the Chemex coffee maker brought to the market, an object whose classic beauty has won it a place in the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection.
Schlumbohm professed inspiration from the form-follows-function ideal of Germany’s Bauhaus design school: “A table must be a table; a chair must be a chair; a bed must be a bed,” he wrote in his memoirs. Accordingly, he reduced the coffee maker to its fundamentals: a wood and leather hand grip (no projecting handle to spoil the hourglass profile), and chemically inert materials to avoid affecting the coffee’s taste. The Pyrex glass vessel with integral pouring spout won’t absorb odors or residues.
Like a latter-day Thomas Edison, Schlumbohm, who died in 1962, was a prolific inventor (with more than 300 patents) and a consummate hustler as well. Shortly after Macy’s sold its first Chemex consignment, Corning Glass Works told Schlumbohm that they’d have to stop supplying the containers unless he could procure a priority rating from the War Production Board. Schlumbohm shrewdly appealed to the Harvard-educated President Franklin Roosevelt with a letter headed “ Minima rex non curat “ (“A king does not bother with details”) “ President curat et minima “ (“A president cares even about details”), and three days later he got his rating.
Chemex coffee makers are available throughout Southern California, including Coffee Merchant in Westside Pavilion; Euro Coffee in Los Angeles; Coast Hardware in Laguna Beach; Coffee Collection and Pannikin, both in San Diego; House of Coffee in South Pasadena, and Ingrid’s Gourmet Kitchen in Ventura.
