Acqua Chiarella Water Bottle | 2020

Designers: Lorenzo Palmeri, Lorenzo Palmeri Studio, Milan (MI), Italy
Manufacturer: Acque Minerali Val Menaggio slr., Como (CO), Italy

The water glass bottle is a constant presence on people's tables, one of the sacred places of family, friendship, meeting, conviviality. Designing a bottle of mineral water means working with this dimension and with the archetype. A beautiful and profound challenge for a designer.

The complexity of the life of a bottle of mineral water is surprising: first of all, the concept itself, not known to all, that a bottle has a life cycle composed of various returns to the starting point, the company, in which it is stripped from 'label, washed with extreme care, disinfected and put back into the circuit. In fact, a bottle can "return to the world" up totwenty times in a few years before leaving and going for recycling. Because glass has the beautiful advantage of transforming itself and not leaving environmental waste.

The "Chiarella" bottle project brings together a chain of strong design themes such as the search for an archetype, an icon and the right gesture. Because the bottle contains and the water takes the shape of its container, which at that moment becomes its vehicle, its way of entering the world. In this sense, the approach was guided by the idea of sewing a container around this special water that could carry it with joy, with the right elegance, like a tailor-made haute
couture suit.

The “Chiarella” bottle has a reminiscent familiarity with “Moka”, the italian coffee machine and somehow with the rigor, and elegance of an abstract idea of the military uniform. Two elements linked to the ancestral popular memory of every Italian.

The work with "Chiarella" meant entering into a relationship with a very strong family reality, so designing the new bottle was a shared, participatory process in which the heart necessarily entered, witness of an attitude, of a strongly heard ethical approach.

The “Chiarella” spring has a very deep and ancient history, made up of information very interesting. For example, who knows that the water we drink can be up to eight hundred years old? That is, having rained eight hundred years before and after a passage through the mountains, the earth, the minerals, the memory, arrive perfect on our tables? These elements could not fail to contribute to the definition of this project.