Most people associate the name Aga with good food and fine living. And although it’s often thought of as quintessentially British, the Aga actually began life in Sweden. The celebrated cooker found in 750,000 households worldwide was invented by Dr Gustav Dalén, a blind Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Appalled that his wife and their maid had to constantly tend to their old-fashioned range, Dalén set out to design a modern cooker that would look after itself. It’s unlikely Dalén could have predicted that his invention would go on to be widely acclaimed as a design icon, but it has. In the year 2000, the BBC published a retrospective of the 20th Century highlighting what it considered to be the top three design icons: first was the Coca-Cola® contour bottle, second was the VW™ Bug and third was the Aga cooker.