This kettle was purchased along with the matching toaster, over a year ago when we first moved into our house and had some loyalty card vouchers to spend in Tesco. We exchanged our vouchers during one of their events, so they quadrupled in value to £120. We decided not to be sensible for once, as we rarely treat ourselves, and we bought the matching kettle and toaster, costing around £60 each. I would never have paid this if we'd been paying for it, but as it was technically at no cost to ourselves, I was happy to add a little class to our (still unfinished!) kitchen. The cheapest I've seen these online is around £54 from Amazon, so worth considering if you have any vouchers to use....

The kettle comes in different colours, including red, black, stainless steel, grey, white, and the very striking blue in the picture. This means it should be fairly easy to find a colour to match whatever look you are trying to achieve in your kitchen. Ours is a pearly cream colour to blend in with our country style kitchen. Although the body of the kettle is quite shiny due to the glossy finish, it doesn't really attract fingerprints which is a bonus. It tapers towards the top in a cone shape, and has a chrome lid and spout. You can see what it looks like from the picture, and it does have a certain retro feel about it but it looks really stylish. There are matching items available, including toaster and coffee machine.

The kettle has a maximum capacity of 1.7 litres. This is perfectly adequate for our household's needs. The most I would ever need to fill the kettle for is for pouring down the sink to clear it, or filling my cat's litter tray when I'm leaving it to soak before cleaning it. When the kettle is full, I'm always pleasantly surprised at how much water it holds. It has a strip along the side (underneath the handle) with a window which shows you how full the kettle is, and this is labelled from 1 to 1.7 litres. Although you might think this isn't as useful as being labelled by number of cups, I always find the cup guides inaccurate anyway, so it's just a general idea for example, being half full or a third full, rather than the exact measurement. This makes it easier to judge how much water you need if there's only two of you, and so is good for efficiency.

Filling the kettle is made very easy by the lid, which is detachable. You can fill the kettle really quickly rather than messing round with the spout. It boils very quickly, although I can't say this is a major concern of mine because I never stand and watch a boiling kettle, I tend to get involved doing other household tasks and sometimes even forget I've put it on at all! It has a 3Kw concealed element which is responsible for the speedy boiling.

One of the best features of this kettle is that it hardly makes any noise as it's boiling, although this does mean sometimes I don't notice when I forget to flick the switch! If you're in the room making a brew, for example when you have visitors, and want to continue your conversation, you'll hardly notice the kettle is there. There's also no indication that the kettle has finished boiling, although if I don't have guests I usually leave the room once I've put the kettle on so it wouldn't really help me unless it was some kind of siren to get my attention.

The kettle has a lovely chunky handle, making it easy to pick up and it's positioned well away from the body of the kettle so that you won't risk burning by touching the sides of the kettle when picking it up. This is one of the safety features. Other safety features are non-slip feet on the base, automatic shut-off when it boils (although I would imagine most kettles have this nowadays), and also boil dry safety cut out, meaning if you've accidentally forgotten to put water in the kettle, it doesn't try to boil it. This just protects the element from damage, which you'd be fairly gutted about if you'd paid full price for the kettle!

The cord on this kettle isn't very long, 1.2 metres to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but unless your socket is right next to the kettle at exactly the same height, it'll be a bit of a stretch. We're lucky in that we designed the electrics for our kitchen as part of our renovation project, so we put them in sensible places. Unfortunately though this still just about reaches from where we planned for the kettle to go, to the socket. I know from experience that not all kitchens have the luxury of sensible sockets, and if that's the case you might find this cord a bit too short to be able to position the kettle where you'd like. I think the reason for the short cord might be because you can store it in the base, but I've no idea who would use this feature as surely most people just leave their kettle plugged in rather than unplugging it and storing the cord away each time?

The base is one of those swivel bases which allows the kettle to be rotated on it. This makes it convenient when you have a kettle full of water as you don't have to worry about positioning it in a certain way, you can just plonk it down. That is my one minor criticism of this kettle, because it is so sturdy, it can get quite heavy when full, so I wouldn't recommend it if you struggle with arthritis or anything similar as it weighs a lot more than a plastic kettle.

I'm not sure what the average lifespan of a kettle is, but we've had this for over a year and it performs as well as it did on day one (not wishing to tempt fate!). The kettle has a filter by the spout which comes out to allow you to clean it. We do this regularly, and we've also used a descaler once or twice to avoid limescale build up. Limescale doesn't seem to be as big an issue with this kettle as it is for previous kettles I've owned, although to some extent I think we do look after this one more due to the hefty price tag. The exterior of the kettle is in good condition, and the colour of the kettle is still fresh with no chips. All in all, this is a lovely kettle, and although I wouldn't pay full price for it, I would recommend it for a touch of luxury in your kitchen.