The Object
Most design icons are chairs, and you cannot carry a chair to the beach. The Olivetti Valentine was different from the start. Ettore Sottsass Jr, working with the young English designer Perry King, drew a portable typewriter and then did the one thing nobody in the office-equipment trade had thought worth doing. He made it beautiful, and he made it want to leave.
Olivetti launched it on 14 February 1969, which is where the name comes from. The body was bright red ABS plastic, a colour borrowed less from stationery than from lipstick and pop art, and it slotted into a matching case you could sling over a shoulder like a bag. Two small orange spools sat on top like a pair of eyes. Nothing about it whispered work.
That was the point. Sottsass said he wanted a machine for use anywhere except an office, something to keep amateur poets company on a quiet Sunday in the country rather than remind anyone of monotonous hours at a desk. He was chasing an idea that sounds obvious now and was close to heresy then, that a typewriter could be an everyday thing, casual as a biro, and could travel.
It was the first serious machine that seemed to belong on a terrace above the sea rather than a desk under a strip light.
The trade was not entirely convinced. The red plastic scratched, the machine cost more than its plainer siblings, and Olivetti's own advertising was faintly embarrassed by how little it looked like a tool. None of that mattered. The Valentine had already crossed over into the place objects go when they stop being products, and by 1971 it was in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Sottsass, half Austrian and wholly Italian, went on to found Memphis and to make Milan the noisiest design city on the continent. But the Valentine may be his cleanest single thought. It took a grey Northern machine, poured it full of Mediterranean colour, and gave it a handle.
You still see them, in the windows of design shops from Milan to Athens, red against the white walls, priced like small paintings. Most will never type another line. They do not need to. They did their real work the moment they made a serious object look like it was on holiday.
