This tiny coffee machine will make you a ‘perfect’ Americano
This tiny coffee machine will make you a ‘perfect’ Americano
This coffee maker has one purpose, and one purpose only.
BY Jesus Diaz
Pebble is the third coffee machine that London-based design firm Layer has created for Kanu, a Korean coffee company obsessed with brewing a cup from machines with the smallest possible form factor. With Pebble, Layer reduced the overall coffee-maker footprint a bit more than its two previous Kanu designs—Urban (which recently won a Red Dot Design Award) and Breeze. Amusingly, the Pebble focuses on making just one type of coffee: the perfect Americano.
At least, that’s what the companies claim this machine does. Being a total piece of Eurotrash, I used to hate the Americano, which Europeans have long believed to be terrible, reheated drip filtered coffee. Espresso, cortado, Moka, even French press or the sock-full-of-coffee infusion that they used to make in my mom’s old village was better than the American alternative.
Nowadays, baristas have dignified the concoction, turning it into a cup that typically has a 1:3 or 1:1 espresso-to-water mix. I’ve learned that on some late mornings, I actually prefer to have an Americano than the typically intense Spanish solos or cortados. Must be old age.
But I digress. For some reason I just love the idea of having a coffee machine at home that is expressly designed for Americanos, even if they’re brewed from a capsule. (Side note: Kanu and the rest of instant coffee makers should license CoffeeB’s plastic-and-metal-free ball system and get rid of this wasteful capsule silliness once and for all).
According to experience design agency Layer and founder Benjamin Hubert—who designed the Pebble—the brief was to create a beautiful, compact, highly functional coffee machine to bring the perfect Americano to the home. “We were asked to create a very new aesthetic for the category that would fit seamlessly into the home environment and challenge the trend towards overly ornate and glitzy coffee machines,” Hubert tells me via email. He believes that they have achieved that using a simple, sensitive, gentle design language to create a more human connection to the product.
“We consider the perfect Americano to be the perfect pour—where the coffee is great tasting, hot, ready to drink, but also celebrated in its making,” he says. “Just as when you are in a cafe and see a barista making a coffee on a large machine behind the counter, Pebble celebrates the process by putting the cup and coffee on a stage. The clean, seamless backdrop elevates the coffee coming from machine to cup, and offers the perfect in-home coffee experience.”
According to Hubert, the Pebble “juxtaposes softly rounded details with strict, rectilinear lines to create a playful machine.” It’s made of a soft-touch polymer that mixes two finishes, gloss and satin, which Hubert thinks makes the Pebble have a premium feel while keeping the affordable price point that Kanu asked for in the brief. He also believes that its minimalistic design makes it fit on any kitchen counter, regardless of the surrounding aesthetic. The Americano machine comes in two colors—coffee cream off-white and charcoal gray—but pricing or availability has not been disclosed yet.
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