When the words “stove top espresso” are uttered, one name and one name alone comes to mind: the Moka Pot. Created nearly 100 years ago, the Moka Pot as we know it was popularized by Bialetti, and its form has gone mostly unchanged in all that time. (In fact, the shape has become so iconic that when Renato Bialetti passed away, his cremated remains were placed in a Moka Pot-inspired urn.)
One could then make a reasonable argument that the stove top espresso maker was due for a new look. Or maybe we should all leave well enough alone. Which side of this schism you fall on will be decided after one look at The Anticline. The award-winning stove top espresso maker by Cultivation Objects is certainly a stop top espresso maker, and it only costs $650.
Cultivation Objects is the Brooklyn-based studio of Nathaniel Wojtalik, whose work “typically revolves around bridging the gap between an art practice and functional design, relying on a narrative structure rooted in human empathy,” per their website. Which is maybe a highfalutin way of saying “statement pieces that you can still use.” The Anticline certainly meets that criteria.
A winner of 2025 Wallpaper+ Design Award, an annual award given out by the international design publication, the Anticline can be seen, as best I can tell, in one of two ways. It can be interpreted, as Wallpaper describes it, as a “remarkable stovetop espresso maker takes its name from the ‘anticline’ geological formation, whereby pressure from tectonic movement or rising magma causes rock to fold, leaving undulating layers, and we love that the phenomenon is mimicked in the rise and fall of water as it becomes coffee in the alchemical process that we habitually take for granted.”
Or you think it looks like what’s left of a Moka Pot after being used as an impromptu weapon by a Tony Soprano type or any of the characters Joe Pesci would play (mostly sans My Cousin Vinny). These are the only two readings of the Anticline.
What’s not up for interpretation, though, is the price tag. It’s solidified like cooled magma into a rock hard $650 American. A touch more expensive than the sixty bucks a 9-cup Moka Pot costs at your nearest Williams Sonoma. But the Anticline is art, functional art—though it’s hard to see how you can actually use the handle without burning the everloving shit out of the backs of your fingers—limited edition, hand-made functional art at that; just over 200 will be made.
Admittedly, as a lover and somewhat collector of weird and wonderful coffee gadgets, I desperately want one. But more in the I-wish-one-would-magically-appear-on-my-counter sort of way than the I’m-willing-to-pay-American-dollars sort of way. It’s the stove top espresso maker version of the EK43 or the Moonraker (or pretty much anything else Weber Workshops puts out). They’re things I desperately need, but what am I, Scrooge McDuck?
But if you have a pool full of gold coins or different financial priorities, then you can get an Anticline stove top espresso maker of your own at the Cultivation Objects official website.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
