A Cactus-Shaped Capsule Machine Design, With No Word on Pods Yet

Most pod brewers are built to fade into the counter. Cacto, a capsule machine shaped after a cactus by designer Anjali Kalamkar, is built to do the opposite, Freeyork reports.

According to the design site, the idea came from the cactus itself: an odd shape that stands out from the plants around it and gets by in rough conditions. Freeyork says the machine looks different from the front and from each side, so there’s no single “good side” and plain back like most appliances. Kalamkar pitches it at the so-called BoBo buyer, short for bourgeois bohemian, someone who picks home things for character over matching the rest of the kitchen.

What Freeyork doesn’t say is just as useful. There’s no price, no release date, no maker attached, and no word on which capsules it takes, whether that’s Nespresso Original, Vertuo, K-Cups or something of its own. The piece is about the shape and the idea behind it, not about the coffee.

Our take: it’s a fun object, but for now treat it as a design project, not something you can order. The capsule format is the question that matters most with any pod machine, since it decides what you’ll be paying for every morning for years. If you’re shopping for a brewer you can actually buy, our Vertuo buying guide compares the current models.