With a curated combination of concrete, brass and wood, AnZa sets the bar for coffee machines to start being viewed as key design features in your home.
Perhaps you are one of those people that wake up to the sound of their blaring alarm and your mind immediately jumps to the cup of coffee you are about to have. Perhaps you’re tired of your appliances looking oddly displeasing on top of your kitchen countertop. Most likely, however, you’re a bit of both, and that’s why you need an AnZa coffee shop in your life.
Admittedly, if you appreciate design in any shape or form, AnZa is quite the revelation. Sure, we are all well aware of general coffee machine hierarchy (some are prettier, some make better espressos), but AnZa is bridging design and functionality unlike anything you may have seen before. Instead of taking coffee-making as a science, AnZa pushes for you to view it as an art, embedded into every single step of the process of making an espresso.
In design school we often hear the sentence “form follows function”. It becomes a mantra for the design process, a sentence every single designer has heard repeatedly during their education, but ultimately it just means that designers often come up with similar looking outputs because they prioritise an object’s function. The intelligence of Anza comes from how they have taken the functional form of a coffee machine, only to dismantle its traditional typology and re-craft it back together with unexpected materials. Every knob, switch or finish has been carefully considered, tested and perfected to result in two splendid coffee machines; AnZa Concrete and AnZa White.
AnZa Concrete is a Brutalist’s dream. Its hand-cast concrete shell, (which in itself is a miraculously complicated craft to master), features porcelain touch-points and beautiful silver switches. It may appear difficult to clean, but the concrete has been treated in order to protect its surface, which means you can rest assured the monolithic sculpture will not deteriorate. You can, however, expect a patina to form over-time, which actually just contributes to the piece’s inherent material roughness.
The beauty of AnZa is that they produce more than just coffee machines. Their accessories, equally considered in materiality, help re-shape the relationship between the user and the designer. We’re talking about accessories as considered and crafted as its Portafilter with its ergonomic wooden or ceramic handle, or the concrete tamper. By creating such considered home-wear, the brand is pushing for a trend which is rising in popularity; bringing high-end design into the otherwise mundane, ordinary and functional daily life.
Have any design enthusiasts sprung to mind? If so, why not gift them a gift card for one of these splendid coffee machines? The shipping is pretty handy-dandy too, as the company ships practically anywhere in the world.