Today our partners are La Marzocco USA are launching a new way to order their popular line of home espresso equipment, called La Marzocco Home. It's a web-based way to customize La Marzocco's GS3 home espresso machine–coffee writer Oliver Strand once called it “the industry gold standard”–similar to how you might customize a pair of Nike basketball shoes, or a brand new car. We've covered the growing range of GS3 customizations available before, and the new La Marzocco Home initiative is an interesting evolution of the espresso machine maker's expanded focus.

The website's interface is pretty, easy to use, and populated with beautiful original drawings by Ben Blake, a cartoonist whose work appears frequently on Sprudge. There's all sorts of information on the history of espresso and La Marzocco you can look at, and videos to instruct you how to make espresso worthy of these machines. But us telling you on a website about a new website seems kind of…well, boring. We wanted to know about the actual La Marzocco Home user experience, and had questions that needed answering: You mean I just order this thing and they ship me a crate? What's up with all that? How does that work?

So we set out to conduct an unboxing of a La Marzocco GS3, complete with some of the product's customization options, shipped to Sprudge.com's East Portland Mt. Tabor Stucco Fortress. The custom machine was the GS3 Auto-Volumetric model, featuring matte white body panels, blue glass side panels, a “Cool Touch” steam wand, and maple accents throughout, including on the machine's group cap, portafilter handle, and steam knob.

A model with customizations retails at $7,844 USD from La Marzocco Home. Let's unbox it!

La Marzocco Home really does start with a pallet getting shipped to your house. Our machine & accoutrements arrived from Seattle in a protective plastic coating.

This, friends, is a high claim item.

Once we got the machine inside (it weighed around 75 pounds), we set about yanking off all that black plastic. Here's what was waiting inside.

Up top you can see a box for the Mazzer Super Jolly grinder the folks at LM sent along to complete the home espresso set-up.

Let's see what's inside! First up, a sweet swag box with cappuccino & demitasse cups, custom La Marzocco Home bar towels, a RattleWare tamper, and a pretty milk pitcher with the La Marzocco lion of Florence logo etched in the metal.







Now for the real swag: our pretty new GS3, all custom modded and shiny. The box looked like this.

And the machine inside said box looked like this:

We'll wait for you to “ooh” and “ahh” some more at the new all-white body option.

She's a beaut!

Also included were the machine's manual, some sweet Urnex + La Marzocco co-branded cleaning supplies, a handy little scale, water test kits (!!) and our specially selected maple-handled portafilter.

That portafilter tho.

The paperwork included this Italian note of inspection, and the signature of the machine's inspector back in Florence.

Time to set the bad boy up. LM USA did not know that these colors matched our kitchen perfectly. Sometimes the world is a wonderful place.

Set-up was a breeze, although to be fair there are a few coffee dorks on staff at Sprudge. Still, we were pulling shots from this lil' beauty at home in no time.

Look at these two little cups, all nestled together on top of our GS3. One is for cappuccino, the other is for espresso. You no longer need to leave the house on weekends.

Unfortunately we didn't get to keep the machine, but she'll always have a place in our hearts. Packing the ol' girl back up for her journey home was rough, but somehow we made it through.

And so ends our adventure with temporary GS3 home ownership. But not for you! La Marzocco Home is now live and waiting to make your kitchen impossibly cuter and more delicious. Just, if you see this machine on the website…say hello for us. We sort of fell in love during this brief visit, and we'll never forget her now. Memories…

All photos by Zachary Carlsen for Sprudge.com