Hasta La Ideas



Cosie is a siphon coffee maker designed to bring the emotional experience of watching your coffee brew at a cafe into the comfort of your own kitchen.

Now that brewing your own cup of coffee is considered a survival skill, finding the right coffee maker should be at the top of our priority lists. Since quarantine dragged us out of coffee shops, when it came to making coffee, we were left to our own devices, literally.

Missing that special barista touch when cafes were temporarily closed during the pandemic, a team of designers created a siphon coffee machine called Cosie that brings the faithful analog experience of big coffee shop machines to the comfort of your own kitchen.

Going to the coffee shop is not only a prerequisite for starting the day, it’s an emotional experience. We look forward to few things like we look forward to our first cup of coffee in the morning. In an attempt to capture that emotional experience and incorporate it into an at-home coffee brewer, the team behind Cosie built their machine with double-layered glass canisters that allow users to watch as their coffee is extracted and brewed.

Since Cosie is a siphon machine, the coffee inside the canisters is extracted through steam pressure generated by boiling water, a process that users can watch while brewing their own coffee. The integrated siphon also makes the general upkeep and management of Cosie much easier to keep up with. After spooning in their desired amount of coffee grinds into the machine’s top compartment, users need only fill the main cartridge with water and turn its handle clockwise to kickstart the brewing process.

From there, the water boils and generates steam pressure to extract the coffee in the machine’s top canister. During this entire process, Cosie makes fine adjustments to the amount of steam released, ensuring that your brew won’t be too strong or watered down. Once you’ve reached your coffee quota for the day, you can clean Cosie easily by filling its cup with only water and let it go through a single brew cycle.

Designers: Juhee Park, Jihee Kim, and Myungji Jung

The two-layered glass canister allows you to watch your coffee brew. 

Find more information on the bottom of Cosie. 

Intuitive controls make brewing coffee as simple as ordering it.

Check on your coffee throughout its brew.

Alerts tell users what their Cosie needs to function.

The main cartridge doubles as a siphon control and mug. 

Press Cosie to start.

When you want to clean Cosie, simply fill its canisters with water and press start.

The double layer of glass makes the extraction and brewing processes transparent.

Cosie’s sleek appearance fits into the modern kitchen.

Huge ribbons of wood provide desk surfaces in this co-working space in Tokyo, created by architecture firm Snøhetta for Japanese tech company Digital Garage.

Snøhetta developed both the interior design and the visual identity for Digital Garage’s new co-working brand, Pangaea.

The company plans to open workspaces in its various office locations around the world.

However this one, located on the 10th floor of a new building complex in Shibuya, will serve as the testbed for ideas.

The name, Pangaea, was the starting point for the design – Pangaea was a supercontinent during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic era that broke up to create today’s continents.

Digital Garage wanted to create a space that encourages people of different cultures and backgrounds to come together and collaborate.

“As a boutique office space for digital nomads, the space commemorates a time and place where geographical, political, and national constructs were not an obstacle,” said Snøhetta.

This concept led the designers to fill the space with “super furniture”, rather than adding individual tables or desks.

Two large wooden objects curve through the entire space, serving various different functions. They incorporate both seating areas and surfaces, so they can be used by numerous people simultaneously.

“Constructed as a metaphor for both tactility and fluidity, the super furniture encompasses all core functions of a co-working space: a reception, an amphitheater, phone booths, meeting spaces and individual workspaces,” said Snøhetta.

“The furniture also prompts its users towards a greater vision through daily interactions with the co-working space and one another.”

Both elements are crafted from Japanese cedar, a material chosen to give the room a natural scent.

Otherwise, the room is kept very simple, with only a few other furniture elements. Seating is provided by chairs and stools that match the dark tone of the flooring, while 534 suspended light bulbs give a topography to the ceiling.

The space is framed by linoleum-fronted cabinets and acoustic textile wall panels, which together create an abstract image of Mount Fuji as a backdrop.

While Snøhetta is best known for its architecture projects, which include an underwater restaurant and the Oslo Opera House, the firm has worked on numerous interior design and branding projects in recent years.

Other examples include physical and digital retail spaces for fashion label Holzweiler and Oslo pop-up A Better Place to Think.

For Pangaea, the studio also designed a set of logos that are used on the facade, for signage and wayfinding inside the building and on the website.

Photography is by Nacasa & Partners.

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The pandemic birthed a lot of home chefs, who discovered a deep and profound love for cooking! Surprisingly, I was one of them. Before the pandemic took place, cooking was a chore I completely avoided. But now, I honestly find it quite therapeutic! The pandemic, and all the free time that came along with it, somehow awakened my inner chef. To encourage and motivate all the inner chefs that came to life during the pandemic, we’ve curated a collection of kitchen appliances that promise to transform cooking from a Herculean feat to an enjoyable and fun process! From a food storage appliance that features an intuitive control design to a sustainable underground fridge that keeps your food naturally chilled – these kitchen products promise to transform your disastrous cooking experiments into MasterChef-worthy delicacies! These products can reduce your prep time in half, make the little cooking tasks much easier, and help you with tedious and complicated techniques. They make cooking effortless and easy. Enjoy!

That plastic kettle sitting on our kitchen counter probably looks like something from a time capsule compared to all the other appliances that have gotten design makeovers. Finally, it is the kettle’s turn and the B POINT shows it all off. It features a touch interface that instantly gets the appliance up to speed with others and lets the user form a more organic connection with it. The circular display has two rings – the outer ring shows the temperature and the inner ring shows the water level inside. Countdown starts after setting the water temperature and will beep once it is ready! The choice of CMF really elevates the simple appliance into an aesthetic product that you can display proudly on your kitchen counter.

Providing leverage for one-handed users, Moray is built with an assortment of chamfers, angled surfaces, and curved edges that hold dishes in one place while they’re getting washed. In refining her universal kitchen sink, Baltazar identified the obstacles faced in the kitchen for one-handed dishwashers and sought to solve them with Moray. Following a series of indirect observation and ideation periods, Baltazar learned that it’s less so about introducing new tools and more about redesigning the sink from the basin up.

ODNY.BOX is a food storage concept with an intuitive control dial and a minimal aesthetic for users to store any type of leftover, from hot baked cookies to cold Greek yogurt. Inspired by the bulbous shape that water makes when it drops on flat surfaces, the glass lid of ODNY.BOX comes together as half of a globe and almost curls under the platform where food is kept to ensure sealed storage. The seasons have an effect not only on the food we eat but also on how that food is kept for tomorrow. During the winter months, the hot food we order or cook at home is subject to cold temperatures, while during the warmer months, perishables like produce are the first to go bad.

A 2021 winner of the Red Dot Design Award, the Gevi rubbishes the notion that a coffee machine needs to look like a large, bulky, boxy appliance. With its cylindrical design that branches out into the cantilevered coffee-grinder and brewer, the Gevi capitalizes on visual drama, looking almost sculptural, like a ballerina on a single leg. While that description maybe a little too artistic for what’s essentially a coffee machine, it drives home a point… that even a mundane kitchen appliance can be designed to look beautiful.

Cellars have been used across the ages to store food or even act like bunker houses in case of natural disasters. Groundfridge takes that design one step further by adding fresh food refrigeration to the game. The trick used by Groundfridge is by utilizing the natural insulating capacity of the ground and the cooler night air temperatures. The balance of this design allows you to store your vegetables, fruits, cheese, and even wine throughout the year. Ventilating this project uses a fan with a timer that replenishes the cool air during the night. Too hot for comfort? An additional cooler can be used to power it during the hottest summer days.

Meet WAMP, an instant cooking pot made from ultra-durable duralumin material, ideal for campers who value multiple uses of things they stuff in the backpack. Although a pretty basic utensil, this solves a very useful purpose. You can put it on top of any oil lantern to employ the heat dissipated to good use. Case-in-point, heating or keeping the food warm without expending any extra energy. Be it cooking piping hot canned food or preparing energy-boosting tea on a long trip to the mountains.

OTOTO‘s Tea Trap puts a fun spin on the art of brewing tea. Unlike those boring metal infusers, the Tea Trap models itself on a carnivorous plant that chomps down on your tea leaves. Once the Tea Trap’s stomach (or mouth) is full, just dunk it in a cup of hot water, and the tea begins infusing through the perforations on the sides of the infuser. Use the Tea Trap’s elongated handle to stir it around till your tea reaches the right color, and when you’re done, the Tea Trap will very kindly spit out the tea leaves into the waste-bin, because nobody likes eating tea leaves… not even carnivorous plants!

Designed as a portable bottle that lets you instantly carbonate your water or beverage whenever you want, the Bottle+ comes with a puck-shaped carbon dioxide chamber, contained in an adapter that screws onto the base of the bottle. Once filled with CO2, the chamber lets you fizz up your beverage with the push of a button. The little chamber, contained within what’s called the Spark Adapter, lets you carbonate your water up to 15 times no matter where you are without any batteries. Once the Spark Adapter is out of CO2, it refills via a home refilling station that sits on your kitchen countertop.

This outdoor grill balances design aesthetics with the robustness of lightweight tubular frame construction to take on any abuse from the off-road environment coming it’s way. It has practically designed dual-zone, high-output BTU propane burners with easily cleanable aesthetics. The Forge 15 grill boasts a fold-out prep table for easy stowing, an easy-to-read temperature gauge, a big steel handle, a removable grease tray, a built-in bottle opener, and a weatherproof cover. While tucked in the vehicle’s tailgate while traveling, the pivoting swingarm moves the grill away from the car for cooking when it’s time to set up camp.

Noticing that people have a harder time removing the water bottle’s lid and holding it while they drink, the designers made Loop so that users can slide the lid over the bottle’s neck when taking a drink. The shape of Loop’s neck was specially designed to double as a storage method for the water bottle’s lid, providing a convenient and sanitary place to carry the cap. Expanding on the design of the Loop, the designers note, “The inside of the loop is gently curved and is an identical match to the bottle’s contours; allowing a tight friction-fit that prevents it from sliding while the user is drinking. Further, the lid doubles up as a convenient carry handle and attachment-point for hanging from bags.”

Nest Bowl is a food and water bowl designed for dogs with an optional, silicone-lined stand that elevates the food bowl so that your dog won’t have to strain their necks every meal.

Pet food bowls aren’t the most adaptable products on the market. As our dogs grow older, straining their necks to meet low-rising food and water bowls might make eating and drinking feel like a chore. It’s important that dogs can eat and drink comfortably when the need arises. Seoul-based creative design studio found / Founded conceptualized a food and water bowl for dogs called Nest Bowl that integrates a removable stand to provide some leverage for your pup when they’re thirsty or hungry.

Designed with a hexagonal shape to keep the food in place better than a round bowl, dogs can really lick their bowl clean with Nest Bowl. Coming in two different sizes, Nest Bowl’s elevated stands are included to elevate the food bowl so that it meets your dog’s height, allowing your pup to eat without having to strain their neck. In addition to its customizable height, users can choose a dual-tone color scheme to match their dog’s personality and home decor.

Each Nest Bowl stand is also lined with a silicone band that wraps around the interior hexagonal shape to ensure that the food and water bowls do not slip. Finally, the bottom of each food stand comes with silicone foot grips to remain in one position on your kitchen floor even when your pup is chowing down and making a mess of lunch.

As dogs grow older, lowering their necks to meet their food and water bowls becomes a strain. It’s for this reason that a taller food bowl is often recommended for aging dogs. With Nest Bowl, your dog’s food bowl will adapt as their physical needs change. With a removable stand, Nest Bowl will rise to meet the changing physical needs of your pup.

Designer: found / Founded

Coming in an array of colors, Nest Bowl can match your kitchen and dog’s personality.

Beijing-based BLUE Architecture Studio has inserted a rectangular volume down the middle of an existing building in China to form a cafe that juxtaposes old and new.

1402 Coffee Shop is a cafe in the Aranya community, which is located in Changli County in China’s Hebei Province.

BLUE Architecture Studio renovated an existing one-storey red brick building with a sloped roof by adding a boxy rectangular volume to the inside of the building, which forms the coffee shop.

The volume is flanked by large glass windows, which include folding sections that open out at each end and connect the interior to its surroundings.

“We wanted to create a new space in the existing space,” BLUE told Dezeen. “Part of the new box comes out of the existing facade and becomes the attraction of the cafe.”

According to BLUE, the studio’s design process involved working out how to combine the necessary functions of the cafe into the rectangular volume, such as a seating area, a bar and a kitchen.

“The indoor corridor is like small lanes of a city with benches on each side,” said the studio. “You can sit on the couch, buy coffee at the bar, browse small products and chat with the coffee makers.”

“It’s very much like taking a casual walk on a little street. We want the interior to be an extension of the Aranya community. Streets and a nearby square are all visible from inside the cafe through big folding glass windows,” continued BLUE.

Dagu cement, a traditional Chinese material, was used to form the rectangular volume, which complements the light grey exposed aggregate concrete floors that surround it.

Solid oak is the primary material in the cafe’s interior, while stainless steel seats are scattered around the outdoor area, which was also designed as part of the project.

Made up of four sections, this seating area includes large planters that are positioned between minimal blocky tables and bars, which enhance 1402’s more contemporary elements.

BLUE explained that the aim of the coffee shop is not to merge old and new architecture together. Rather, the studio hopes that the project highlights differences between the rectangular volume and the existing red brick building, which was built between five and six years ago.

“We created the rectangular volume in an abstract form to contrast with the building’s existing sloped roof,” said the studio.

Despite these contrasts, BLUE sought to blend the coffee shop with the appearance of the Aranya community by choosing a neutral colour palette similar to the red brick structure.

BLUE Architecture Studio was founded in 2014 by Japanese architects Yoko Fujii and Shuhei Aoyama. Similar projects by the firm include the addition of a U-shaped glass box to a Shanghai coffee shop.

The photography is by Zhi Xia. 

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