True coffee aficionados (or bores, depending on your patience) can talk endlessly about the virtues of one bean over another or how they only use a limited-edition blend from a far-flung place you’ve barely heard of.

Then the talk moves on to coffeemakers and wherever coffee fans are gathered the Chemex hand-blown coffee maker will inevitably get a glowing review.

Designed in 1941 by Peter Schlumbohm, it looks like something you’d find in a lab – though its wooden belt (or corset if you look at the Chemex as a being an hourglass shape) gives it a domestic, almost craft feel.

Genius marketer

German-born Schlumbohm was a chemist, a genius marketer and serial inventor and his glass coffeemaker was immediately lauded as a perfect example of design simplicity.

There isn’t even spout – just a groove in the glass and apart from the glass and wood all the user needed was a paper filter so the Chemex ticked all the boxes for Bauhaus-inspired purists who prized honest functionality over useless decoration.

By just 1942 its design was recognised as being something special when the Museum of Modern Art in New York put it on the cover of its Useful Objects in Wartime magazine.