We are sitting with Alexander in his country house, in his living room, bathed by the low autumn sunshine. He is relaxed, homely, wearing a large knitted sweater and moccasins, laughing a lot, unusually, and a tiny mesh wrinkles appears around his eyes. He looks younger in an informal setting, and doesn’t look like a top manager of a large company. What surprised me most was that he is an expert in everything — from the managing the processes in the company to the heating systems.

— Happiness is not living safely within the confines of what you know, it is pushing beyond your boundaries and feeling of what would it consist in. Look at the Italians, they are a people obsessesed with the expression of beauty in their designs, but for the past fifty years they have learned to combine beauty with technological efficiency.

I needed a reliable heating system that was capable of surviving the harsh Russian Winter. I considered all the possible risks such as power cuts and falls in gas pressure. Their specialists designed a completely autonomous system for me. It can be programmed and managed remotely via my mobile phone. It automatically adjust the gas flow for optimum usage and I can monitor the gas and water consumption so I am in complete control of my bills. The boilers are very good looking and it was installed rapidly and professionally, my boiler room is neat and tidy and technologically advanced.

And you should apply this principle. We need to change totally our concept and start to create clear and beautiful things, otherwise we couldn’t change the situation. And everything will be in a way it is now. For sure, for Italian it is easier as they have so many beautiful things around them, and we are here struggling constantly with the external conditions like bureaucracy and hard weather....but it is 20th century now and we have changed as well...