The Cutting Board Era is Over

For about a year, my morning coffee routine involved a small act of engineering that I was too stubborn to acknowledge as a problem.

My machine is a Nespresso Essenza Mini. My drink of choice is a double-shot iced latte - which means a tall glass. The Essenza Mini, as it turns out, was not designed with tall glasses in mind. The clearance under the spout is maybe half of what you'd need.

So I adapted. First I used a small cup to catch the shots, then poured them into the tall glass with ice. Annoying, but workable. Then I started tilting the glass at an angle to get it under the spout. Also annoying, and occasionally disastrous. Then, at some point I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, I started stacking small cutting boards under the machine to raise it up.

That worked. Technically. But I was now the person with a Nespresso sitting on top of two wooden cutting boards every morning, like some kind of improvised cairn on my kitchen counter.

I lived with this for a year.

Then one morning — mid-tilt, tall glass precariously angled, waiting for the shot to finish — something clicked. I have a diploma in industrial design. I own a 3D printer. I have design software on my iPad. I have been walking around this specific, solvable problem for twelve months.

I opened Shapr3D that afternoon.

Three weeks and more failed prototypes than I'd like to count later, the Elevate Dock existed. It raises the machine to exactly the right height for a 15cm tall glass, adds magnetic pod storage on the sides, and fits the Essenza Mini's footprint without looking like an afterthought.

The cutting boards are back in the kitchen drawer where they belong.

The Elevate Dock STL is available now in the shop — SGD 25 to download and print your own. The limited physical edition, finished by hand in the studio, ships Q3 2026.

If you have a Nespresso Essenza Mini and a tall glass problem, this one's for you.