The AnZa Coffee Machine and the Case for Concrete in the Kitchen

Most kitchen appliances are designed to disappear. They come in white or brushed steel, they tuck under cupboards, and they are judged by how little they ask of the room. The espresso machine has always been the exception. It is the one appliance people place in full view, polish, photograph and talk about, a small piece of café architecture brought home. For a long time that architecture spoke one language: chrome, steel, a gleaming Italian body. The AnZa asked what would happen if it spoke concrete instead.

The machine began in a backyard shed in Berkeley, California, in a design studio that worked next to an espresso repair shop. Montaag, the studio founded in 2013 by Per Ivar Selvaag, a car designer who had worked for BMW and Peugeot, developed it with Andrew Smith and with the neighbouring repair shop, Kanen Coffee, whose benches were full of machines that had failed in ordinary kitchens. Four years of testing followed. In the summer of 2017 the team took the result to Kickstarter, where 201 backers pledged a little over 145,000 dollars. The first machines came in two versions: hand-cast concrete with porcelain details, or smooth white Corian. Montaag described the idea at the time as an attempt to expand the material vernacular of the espresso machine, which is a polite way of saying that nobody had thought of pouring one. Today the company works as Anza Studios from Stavanger in Norway.

The material carries a long argument with it. When Le Corbusier completed the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille in 1952, he left the concrete as it came out of its wooden formwork, the grain of every board still visible on the surface. The French term for this was béton brut, raw concrete. A year later Alison Smithson, who worked with her husband Peter, used the phrase "new brutalism" in print, and in 1955 the critic Reyner Banham gave the phrase its essay and its reputation. For decades brutalism belonged to housing estates, universities and car parks. It is a curious turn that its most affectionate audience today may be found at home, among people who want a little of that honesty on the kitchen counter. Look closely at the newer AnZa and you can see the same idea at a smaller scale: the grey surface carries the marks of the wood it was cast against.

Underneath the shell, the machine is less radical than it looks, and that is a compliment. Espresso is a question of heat held steady. When Ernesto Valente introduced the Faema E61 in 1961, it was celebrated for an electric pump, a thermosyphon that kept the brew group at temperature, and an automatic pre-infusion that wetted the coffee gently before full pressure arrived. The current AnZa Concrete, the R2, follows that inheritance with modern parts. A PID controller holds the boiler at 93 degrees Celsius, a separate thermocoil produces steam on demand, the brew pressure can be adjusted between 8 and 12 bar, and the pre-infusion is there too. Switches on top separate hot water, brew and steam, a pressure gauge sits beside the group, and the glass water tank lifts out.

The portafilter measures 58 millimetres, a size shared by a great many home and café machines, which matters more than it sounds. It means that the accessories around an AnZa are not proprietary curiosities but part of a wider culture. The AnZa Concrete Tamper is the clearest example: a heavy concrete handle on a stainless steel base, made for the AnZa and equally at home pressing coffee into any other 58 millimetre basket. It is the smallest piece of brutalism you can hold in one hand.

During Milan Design Week in April 2026, AnZa was among the independent studios in the DEORON programme that opened together with industrialkonzept. Seen there, between reclaimed wood and hand-poured beeswax, it looked less like an appliance than like a small piece of sculpture that happened to make coffee.

What the AnZa really changed is the way people look at the counter around it. Once one object on it is heavy, grey and frankly built, the rest begins to follow. Cups are the first thing to reconsider. The Bronto Espresso Cups by the studio Supergroup for Hem are stocky, glossy and recognisable by their uncommonly fat handles, small vessels with a sense of humour that sit well against a serious machine. For those who prefer steel, the Arlo 03 by Service Projects is made of stonewashed stainless steel with a double wall, so the coffee stays hot while the outside stays cool. It holds 260 millilitres, compact enough for an espresso and generous enough for a filter coffee, and its saucer doubles as a small plate for olives later in the day.

The details can be smaller still. Koichi Futatsumata designed his Coffee Spoon for valerie_objects after his favourite technical pencil, with a faintly octagonal body that sits naturally between the fingers. It is the kind of object one notices only after the third or fourth morning, which is exactly the point.

Concrete, meanwhile, can leave the machine and take up other positions in the kitchen. The Broquaine Vase by Patrick Paris for Serax is cast in concrete and then broken open at the top by individual hammer strikes, so that no two rims are alike. It is a gesture straight out of a building site, softened by whatever stems one puts inside. Because concrete is not watertight, a small glass or inner vase does the practical work, a reminder that raw materials come with their own manners.

Not every morning calls for espresso. On slower days a filter coffee or a moka pot makes more sense, and the grind decides most of the result. The Aarke Coffee Grinder, designed by Carl Ljungh and Jonas Groth, uses 64 millimetre flat burrs and a dial that runs from moka pot to cold brew. In stainless steel it is the polished counterpart to concrete, which is how the two materials have always looked best: side by side.

There is, after all, more than one kind of concrete. Le Corbusier's is rough and records the hand of the builder. Tadao Ando's is something else entirely. For the Church of the Light, completed in Ibaraki near Osaka in 1989, he cast walls 38 centimetres thick and cut a cross into the wall behind the altar, so that daylight itself becomes the only ornament. His surfaces are so dense and smooth that the critic Philip Drew described the effect as a taut, textile surface rather than a heavy mass. Taschen's compact monograph Ando follows that work from small private houses to museums, and it belongs on a kitchen shelf at least as much as on a desk.

The AnZa sits somewhere between those two traditions: rough enough to show how it was made, precise enough to pull a good shot every morning. Along the way it has persuaded a good number of people that the most technical object in the kitchen could also be its most architectural one, and that a morning ritual deserves something with a little weight to it.

Photography: Elias Ruester (cover). Images: Courtesy of AnZa, Hem (photography by Erik Wåhlström), Service Projects, valerie_objects, Serax, Aarke and TASCHEN