Room for the Leaves
In East Frisia, the flat coastal corner of north-west Germany, tea is less a drink than a timetable. People there drink around 300 litres each a year, roughly ten times the German average, and the ritual has rules. A lump of rock sugar, the Kluntje, goes into a thin cup. The tea is poured over it with care, a spoonful of cream is laid on top so that it rises as a small white cloud, and nobody stirs. Three cups are the custom; a local saying calls it the East Frisian right. In 2016 the region's tea culture was entered into Germany's national inventory of intangible cultural heritage.
It is a culture that takes the pot seriously, which makes one name on a list worth a second look. Among the collections that hold its teapot, Mono counts the Ostfriesisches Teemuseum in Norden. The object in question is made of glass and stainless steel, designed in Frankfurt and produced in Mettmann, a small town near Düsseldorf better known for cutlery.
The story of the Mono Classic begins in the autumn of 1980, at a tea evening in the Rosenthal Studiohaus in Frankfurt. Tassilo von Grolman, a designer and a committed tea drinker, had been invited to speak about the design and function of teapots. According to Mono, he found himself admitting that good tea really needed two pots: one to brew in, and a second, warmed pot into which the tea was poured through a strainer. The answer did not satisfy him. After a sleepless night he arrived at the idea that became the Mono teapot, a strainer almost as large as the pot itself, so that the leaves would have room to open.
Grolman, born in Iserlohn in 1942, came to design by an indirect route. He trained as a machine fitter at AEG in Oldenburg and studied mechanical engineering before turning to design at the Werkkunstschule in Kassel, and he worked as an assistant to Arnold Bode, the founder of documenta. In Frankfurt his work moved between packaging, branding and products. Looking back, he has described the small strainers of conventional teapots as prisons for the leaves, which explains the whole object in a single image.
With a glass bowl set in a metal frame and a large strainer inside it, he went from manufacturer to manufacturer and announced that this was the teapot of tomorrow. The large makers of pots and services turned him away. Mono, the family manufactory in Mettmann, saw it differently. Almost 25 years earlier the company had launched Mono A, Peter Raacke's radically plain cutlery, and it knew what it meant to bring out something the trade was not yet ready for. Wilhelm Seibel, of the fourth generation of the family, took to the design, and the Mono Classic came onto the market together with Grolman in 1983.
The construction reads like a diagram. The pot is a hemisphere of heat resistant borosilicate glass, which Mono rates to 200 °C, held in a frame of stainless steel. The strainer is a fine stainless steel mesh that fills almost the entire volume, so the leaves move freely in the water instead of sitting packed in a small basket. The geometry of the glass has a quieter purpose too: the last of the liquid, with the fine tea dust it carries, stays at the bottom of the pot rather than ending up in the cup. Today the glass comes from Mainz, the mesh from the Münsterland and the frame from Bavaria. Lids are stamped from 1 mm stainless steel, and the parts are joined by spot welding on fixtures developed in Mono's own toolmaking shop.
Glass changes the ritual as much as the strainer does. The tea is visible from the moment the water meets the leaves, and the colour deepens in front of you, from pale gold to amber, so that the brewing time becomes something you watch rather than count. The Mono Classic Teapot stands on a separate warmer, a small stainless steel ring with a tealight beneath the glass.
In 1986 Grolman added a version with the warmer built into the frame, the Mono Classic with integrated warmer, in which pot, tray and tealight become a single object. In 1990 the Filio followed as a further reduction of the idea, with a floating glass bowl that Mono compares to the cantilever chairs of the Bauhaus.
Recognition came quickly. Mono lists the Cooper Hewitt in New York and the Corning Museum of Glass, both from 1985, alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, the Staatliches Museum für angewandte Kunst in Munich and the Boiler House Project at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The company also notes, with some dryness, that the teapot was copied as often as it was awarded. More than a million have left the manufactory in Mettmann since 1983.
What the pot shares with the East Frisian table is an attitude to time. A teapot on a warmer is an invitation to stay for the second and the third cup, to let the conversation run on while the tealight does its work. It suits the weeks after the clocks go back, when the light goes early and a pot that stays warm for an hour is worth more than one that pours quickly.
There is also the question of how long an object should last. Every part of the Mono teapots is sold separately, from the glass to the lid, so a broken bowl means a new bowl rather than a new pot. Mono says its teapots hold their value on the second hand market like a Porsche or a shelf by Dieter Rams, a comparison made with a straight face. The full range is in the Mono collection.
More than four decades after that evening in Frankfurt, the strainer is still almost as large as the pot. The leaves never asked for much more than that: room, warmth and a little patience.
Photography: Marina Hoppmann, Haw-lin Services, Fabian Frinzel and Nadia Morozewicz. Archive drawing: Courtesy of Mono.
