The Digital Nomad Setup: Katarina P., UX Designer, Everywhere

By Sophie Renard · 7 min read

Katarina Petrović has not had a permanent address in three years. She is a UX designer who works remotely for a fintech company based in Berlin, and she moves every four to eight weeks — Lisbon, Split, Thessaloniki, Tallinn, wherever the Airbnb prices and weather and WiFi align. She travels with one carry-on suitcase, a backpack, and two items that her colleagues find unreasonable: an Arco Viaggio and an Arco Zero grinder.

The Weight Calculation

Katarina's packing system is optimized with the ruthlessness of someone who has been living out of a carry-on for three years. Every item has a weight, a purpose, and a justification. The carry-on itself is a 38-liter bag that weighs 2.1 kilograms empty and holds everything she owns except the backpack and what she is wearing. She knows the weight of every item because she weighed them — once, methodically, on a kitchen scale in a Porto Airbnb — and entered them into a spreadsheet. The Viaggio weighs 340 grams. The Zero grinder, which she dismantles for travel, weighs 1.8 kilograms with the adjustment ring and burr set packed separately in a padded pouch. Together with a small tamper and a folding camping cup, her coffee kit totals 2.4 kilograms. This is, by any reasonable standard, a significant allocation of weight for someone whose total luggage allowance is 10 kilograms on budget airlines. Her colleagues on the team's Slack channel have pointed this out. Her team lead in Berlin, who drinks filter coffee from the office machine without thinking about it, once asked why she does not just buy coffee at cafes. Katarina's answer was financial and practical. She spends roughly four months of each year in southern European cities where espresso costs one to two euros at a cafe, which is affordable. But she also spends time in Scandinavia, the UK, and the Baltics, where a specialty espresso costs four to six euros. At two coffees a day, that is eight to twelve euros daily — sixty to eighty euros a week. The Viaggio and Zero together cost her about thirty cents per espresso, including the beans. Over three years of nomadic living, the setup has saved her somewhere between three and five thousand euros, depending on which cities she counts. The spreadsheet confirms this. Katarina has a spreadsheet for everything.

The Airbnb Kitchen Problem

Every Airbnb kitchen is different, and most of them are terrible for making coffee. Katarina has developed a taxonomy. Category one: the well-equipped kitchen with a stovetop moka pot, decent cups, and sometimes a French press. These are rare, maybe fifteen percent of her stays, and almost exclusively in Italy and Portugal. Category two: the basic kitchen with a kettle, a microwave, and a capsule machine that accepts a proprietary pod format she does not carry. These are about fifty percent of stays. Category three: the aspirational kitchen with an expensive-looking but poorly maintained espresso machine — scale-clogged, missing the drip tray, with a portafilter that has not been cleaned since the previous guest. These are about twenty percent. Category four: the kitchen with nothing — a hotplate and a single pan. About fifteen percent, usually in cheaper stays or studio apartments. The Viaggio and Zero eliminate the dependence on any of these categories. All she needs is hot water, and every kitchen has a way to boil water. In category-one kitchens, she uses the stovetop kettle. In categories two through four, she uses the electric kettle if present, or she heats water in a pot on whatever cooking surface exists. The Zero grinds the beans she buys locally — she seeks out a specialty roaster within the first two days of arriving in any new city, which has become a reliable way to explore a neighborhood — and the Viaggio does the rest. She sets up on whatever counter space is available, which sometimes means the bathroom counter when the kitchen is too small. She has made espresso on a windowsill in Tallinn, a ironing board in Split, and a dining table in Thessaloniki. The setup is indifferent to its surroundings. It works everywhere, which is exactly the quality she requires from everything she owns.

The First Morning in a New City

Katarina has a first-morning routine that she follows in every new city. She arrives, usually in the afternoon or evening. She drops her bags, checks the WiFi speed, locates the nearest supermarket, and buys basics — milk, bread, fruit, water. She does not make coffee that first evening. The next morning, she wakes early — jet lag or time zone shifts make this reliable — and makes her first espresso in the new space. This is the moment the apartment becomes temporarily hers. She describes it as planting a flag. The coffee kit comes out of the suitcase. The Zero gets assembled — burrs seated, adjustment ring set to her standard espresso setting, hopper attached. She measures beans from whatever bag she is finishing from the previous city. She grinds, tamps, heats water, and presses the Viaggio's lever. The first shot in a new city is almost always slightly off — the water is different, the altitude is different, the beans are nearing the end of a bag — and she adjusts from there. By the second or third shot, she has it dialed in. The ritual of making espresso in an unfamiliar kitchen creates a continuity between cities that she otherwise lacks. Her bedroom changes every month. Her kitchen changes. The view from her window changes. The language outside changes. But the act of grinding beans, pressing the lever, tasting the result — this stays constant. It is the thread that runs through Lisbon and Tallinn and everywhere between. She has made coffee in twenty-three cities across fourteen countries in the last three years. The espresso varies in quality because the beans vary, the water varies, and the conditions vary. But the act of making it does not vary, and that consistency is worth the 2.4 kilograms in her suitcase.

The Zero Grinder and the Question of Commitment

People sometimes ask Katarina why she carries the Zero when cheaper, lighter hand grinders exist. The question is reasonable. The Zero, even disassembled, is heavier and more expensive than a standard travel hand grinder. Her answer is about grind quality and, underneath that, about what she is willing to compromise on and what she is not. The Zero produces espresso-grade grinds with a consistency that cheaper grinders cannot match. The 64mm flat burrs create a particle distribution that is tight and even, which means the water flows through the coffee bed uniformly, which means the extraction is predictable. Cheaper grinders with smaller conical burrs produce more fines and more boulders — particles that are too small and too large — which leads to uneven extraction and inconsistent shots. Katarina can taste the difference. She verified this experimentally during a stay in Ljubljana, grinding the same coffee on the Zero and on a budget hand grinder she borrowed from a cafe owner, then pulling shots on the Viaggio with each. The Zero-ground shots were cleaner, sweeter, and more balanced. The budget grinder shots were muddier and more bitter. The difference was not subtle. Her nomadic life involves daily compromises — small beds, unreliable WiFi, kitchens she cannot control, the absence of a stable social circle. She accepts these compromises because the freedom they buy is worth it. But she has learned, over three years, that certain things should not be compromised on: her laptop, her headphones, her grinder. These are the tools of daily life, used every day, and their quality directly affects her quality of life. The Zero grinder weighs 1.8 kilograms. Her noise-canceling headphones weigh 250 grams. Her laptop weighs 1.4 kilograms. Together, these three items account for nearly half the weight of her carry-on. She does not apologize for this. The suitcase holds what matters. Everything else, she buys and leaves behind.

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