Function Meets Style in the Ico Bottle Opener

By Ann Binlot Published June 28, 2016

There are bottle openers, and then there are bottle openers. They come in many forms, from the gadget that’s attached to your Swiss Army Knife to Dango Products’s hook/bottle opener. There’s the kind that professional bartenders keep in their back pockets that are shaped a rectangle, and the ones that come with your conventional corkscrew. Then there are the bottle openers that you keep on your keychain or the ones that come on magnets for your fridge. Bottle openers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But you haven’t seen a bottle opener until you’ve caught a glimpse of the Ico Bottle Opener.

The folks over at Fort Standard, a Brooklyn-based, contemporary American design studio founded by friends and collaborators Gregory Buntain and Ian Collings, created the Ico Bottle Opener while crossing the boundaries of functional metal frameworks.

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“If we have an idea, we have to explain to the other person why we think it’s a valid idea,” said Buntain in OTHR. That’s often an advantage because it sparks different ideas in the other person’s head, and we each bring in our own insights and inspirations.”

The bottle opener can be used as a sculptural table top decoration while not in use. The 3-D hexagonal shape is so complicated that it comes not from a cast, but from a 3D printed bronze. Every side of the object is capable of opening the bottle. That means all 20 of the facets on the icosahedron can pop open a bottle of soda, beer, or whatever else you need a bottle opener for. That means that it’s not just one bottle opener, but actually 20 in one.

So if you want a bottle opener that beats out all others and that can be a cool decoration piece for your home, the Ico Bottle Opener is it.

The Ico Bottle Opener, by Fort Standard, $70 at othr.com.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Ann Binlot is a New York-based freelance writer who contributes to publications like The Economist, Wallpaper*, Monocle…

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