Lékué

In a Barcelona bar in the late 1970s, a waiter was beating a metal ice tray against the counter. He was trying to free a single cube and the tray would not give it up. The noise carried across the room. José María Llorente was sitting on the other side of the bar, watching, and the thought that arrived was not complicated: why is this thing rigid? Why is a container that has to release its contents made of something that grips them?

He founded Lékué in 1980, outside Barcelona, and the first product was an ice tray you could bend. That is the whole of the beginning. Every steam case, bread mould and cake tin the company has made since descends from one man deciding that a hard object should be soft.

For its first twenty-five years the company made product for other people's brands. That changed in 2005, when new management arrived and brought in four designers supervised by Luki Huber, who had spent years working alongside Ferran Adrià at elBulli. This is the part of the story that explains the products. Lékué did not come out of a housewares boardroom. It came out of the same Catalan kitchen culture that rebuilt modern cooking from first principles, and it asks the same kind of question: not how do we improve the cake tin, but why is the cake tin shaped like that at all.

The answer they landed on was platinum silicone, cured with platinum as the catalyst rather than the cheaper peroxide most manufacturers use. It costs more. It also does not soften in the oven, does not crack at minus sixty, does not leach into food and does not take on the smell of what you cooked last time. Nearly two hundred products have been built on that material, and the company backs them for ten years.

In 2021 Lékué was bought by Brabantia, the Dutch group whose bins and storage have been in Australian kitchens for decades. The Barcelona office kept the design and innovation work, and the products still come out of the same workshops, run the same way, chasing the same question the waiter asked without meaning to.