[Alessio Alessi is pictured with Philippe Starck's Jucy Salif, one of the Italian design company's most iconic products.]

The handsome and shy Alessio Alessi was in Dallas on Monday to visit his newest store, which opened a couple of months ago in Preston Royal shopping center. We had coffee in the shop’s sleek Italian style restaurant next door, and let me say that it was terrific coffee, served strong and hot in one of those wonderful little personal sized Alessi carafs. Alessio arrived in Dallas on Sunday, and to his dismay wandered around downtown in search of anything open. “Your downtown is for business only, no?” he queried in a thick Italian accent. Alessio did manage to find the DMA doors open, and to his delight, noticed that two of Alessi’s designs were on display in the permanent decorative arts collection, including a highly impractical sterling silver tea service designed by the famed Japanese architectural firm, Sanaa. “To mass produce these would be impossible,” Alessi told me, “but these designs that are experimental helped open the doors for working with other architects like Michael Graves,” whose teapot was successfully produced for Alessi and is instantly recognizable. At any given time, Alessi’s designers are working on about 600 ideas, Alessio said,with 50-60 ideas making it into production each year. “So, today we are working on what you will see in 2010 in the shops,” he said. Alessio’s grandfather founded the famed design company in Italy in 1921, and his father designed many of its products. Alessio’s 26 year old son has just joined the business and is one of its new creative designers. “I’m more the business side of things,” he apologized, then smiling broadly, described his son’s first — and only — design so far, the “Pop Up” bottle opener. “It took two years to design, so you can see why he only has one. But I have to tell you, it is the best seller of all the new products in the stores,” Alessio added, proudly.