For 125 years, German brand Alape has been perfecting the visual as well as haptic experience of washbasins and washstands made of glazed steel.
In product design, we frequently talk about form and function. Yet there is one factor that often – even if subconsciously – determines the favour or disfavour of potential users: the tangible experience of a product through touch. The material as a tactile surface can be worth more than a thousand words. This explains why Alape, as a specialist in glazed steel products, pays particularly close attention to this aspect.
A brief digression into human biology: among the five senses, the sense of touch is most essential to survival. It is only thanks to tactile perception via the skin as a sense organ that we are able to feel emotions such as touch, tenderness, pain or warmth. The importance of this ability is already demonstrated by the fact that the sense of touch is the first to emerge in the womb, in just the second month of embryonic development.
At first glance, this may seem unrelated to enamelled steel, which Alape has been producing for 125 years. But it’s about much more than practical bathroom products: it’s about emotions. This is perfectly captured by the anniversary motto of the company founded in 1896 by Adolf Lamprecht in Penig, Saxony: ‘Embracing Water for 125 Years’. There could be no better way to unite the two existential human needs: the aforementioned sense of touch – embodied by an embrace – and the element of water as the source of life.
Based in Goslar, Germany, since its reestablishment in 1954, Alape attaches great importance to the surfaces of its products, and not only for the purpose of aesthetic appearance or material properties. It is the surfaces that make the expressively designed basins come alive. They bring haptics and optics into harmony. Serially produced one-of-a-kind pieces are created by applying each layer of enamel glaze to the titanium steel by hand. This is ideally expressed, for example, in the smooth Aqua surface series: depending on the incidence of light – as the name suggests – the colours and transparencies of the enamelling seem to move like water.
A second surface series offering unique tactile properties is Terra, containing the finest mineral particles within the glaze, which gives the products a soft matt texture. Starting this year, the Terra shades Silk Matt, Oyster Matt, Nordic Matt and Gravel Matt, which were first introduced back in 2018, are also available for the Stream basin.
