I Was Just Trying to Descale My Espresso Machine

This was not supposed to become an essay about Heirloom. I was just trying to descale my espresso machine.

The problem was, I couldn't find the directions. I've had this thing forever. I knew it was a Starbucks Barista, and I vaguely remembered that underneath the Starbucks branding it was actually some kind of Saeco workhorse. So I asked ChatGPT how to descale it. It asked me for the exact brand and model.

Fair enough. So I started digging around the machine, then around the internet, trying to figure out exactly what I owned. And that's how I stumbled onto an article titled "Starbucks Barista Espresso Machines: The Cult Classic That Refuses to Die."

I started reading, and I just laughed. Because apparently I've had a piece of the Heirloom philosophy sitting on my kitchen counter for years.

The Starbucks Barista was built by Saeco. It's a relatively simple machine: boiler, pump, switches, replaceable parts. Not a lot of complicated electronics. Nothing particularly exotic. It was built like a tool. And the damn things just keep going.

Mine certainly has.

Here's the part that makes the story even better. After about five years with the Barista, I decided to "upgrade." I bought a Breville that cost roughly twice as much. It was newer, nicer, more sophisticated. It felt like the obvious successor to an aging espresso machine.

The Breville lasted about a year.

So I pulled the old Starbucks Barista back out. And I'm still using it in 2026.

Think about how absurd that is. The old machine wasn't replaced because it failed. It was replaced because I assumed newer and more expensive meant better. Then the replacement failed, and the obsolete machine came back.

There's a lesson in there that sits very close to the reason we're building Heirloom. We've become very good at making products that are impressive when they're new. I'm increasingly interested in products that are impressive when they're old.

Those are different engineering problems. One optimizes the experience at purchase: features, packaging, screens, software, convenience, novelty. The other asks a much less glamorous question: Will this damn thing still work?

And maybe that's one of the simplest tests of an heirloom object. Not whether it's expensive, handmade, or wrapped in a beautiful story about craftsmanship. Not whether somebody photographs it on a walnut table next to a leather notebook.

Just: Did it earn the right to stay?

My Starbucks Barista has. It survived its own replacement. It survived Starbucks moving on from it. It survived whatever technological improvements were supposedly going to make it obsolete. And somewhere along the way, people kept repairing these things, documenting them, modifying them, and passing along the knowledge required to keep them working.

Which brings me back to how I found all of this in the first place: I needed to descale mine.

That's what maintenance does. Maintenance forces you into a relationship with an object. You have to understand it. You have to learn what it needs. Sometimes you have to open it. Sometimes you have to find the person on the internet who figured out twenty years ago which gasket fits. And gradually the relationship changes. It stops being something you consume. It becomes something you keep.

That's the distinction I want Heirloom to understand. We're not interested in making things that merely look permanent. We want to make things worth maintaining, worth repairing, worth understanding, and worth bringing back out of the cabinet when their shiny replacement dies.

I went looking for descaling instructions. Instead I found a pretty good description of the company we're trying to build.