The 60s phone that looks like it belongs next to your keyboard
It looks like a computer mouse, but it's not. The Grillo was a breakthrough in the mid-1960s when Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper designed it for Siemens. Their philosophy: complex on the inside, dead simple on the outside.
The challenge was brutal. Fitting all the components into something pocket-sized meant every part had to shrink. The result was way smaller than even Dreyfuss's sleek Trimline—and much more radical.
The clever bit? A snap-open mechanism. Lift the phone, it clicks open, mic's ready. For the first time, dial and receiver lived in the same piece. Simple, satisfying, revolutionary.
The Grillo—Italian for "cricket"—gets its name from its cricket-like ringtone Available in vibrant colors that screamed 1960s pop culture, it made phones feel friendly instead of corporate. The Compasso d'Oro in 1967 agreed.
Looking back, Zanuso and Sapper reimagined how we interact with phones. That snap-open clamshell—lifting to open, folding to close—became the blueprint for flip phones three decades later.
"A shell-like object which affirms the intimacy of conversation" — MoMA
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