Aarke: an honest buyer's tour of the sparkling water maker store from sweden

Official homepage: https://aarke.com

Kitchen stores usually hide their appliances. Aarke built a brand on the refusal to hide — a Stockholm design house, founded in 2013 by industrial designers Jonas Groth and Carl Ljungh, whose entire thesis is that the sparkling water machine earns its place on the counter the way a espresso machine or a wine fridge does: by being beautiful enough to leave out. The company calls its approach "prestige home carbonation," sells in more than thirty countries, and has spent a decade quietly expanding from its iconic lever-operated carbonator into glass bottles, water purifiers, and — more recently — an SCA-certified coffee system. I went through the machines, the CO2 economics, and a Trustpilot page that reads like a civil war. Here is the store across its dimensions.

A Bottle-Free Manifesto, Stockholm Edition

The founding argument is environmental and aesthetic at once. A household drinking two liters of store-bought sparkling water a day discards more than seven hundred plastic bottles a year; Aarke's answer is a solid stainless machine with no cord, no batteries, and no electronic parts — just a lever, a valve, and standard CO2. The environmental credentials run deeper than the machine: the company's cylinders use one-hundred-percent renewable CO2, the bottles are dishwasher safe, and the packaging is plastic-free. It is a sustainability pitch wrapped in brass-and-matte-black industrial design, and it made the Carbonator 3 the machine the design press — Wirecutter's upgrade pick, Good Housekeeping's best-in-class fizz — refuses to stop praising.

The Machine Wall

The catalog is curated rather than broad. The Carbonator 3, at $229 in its base finishes and more for special editions across eight colors including copper and brass, is the bestseller: a one-liter PET bottle, stainless drip tray, and the progressive lever that controls fizz by press count. The Carbonator Pro, at $349, swaps the PET bottle for a dishwasher-safe glass carafe, adds one-handed push-to-lock carbonation, and stands twenty inches tall — reviewers note the heft and the requirement to lay the machine flat for cylinder swaps. Around them: a glass-and-steel water purifier jug that owners describe as absurdly better than Brita, replacement bottles at $14 to $20, a $40 glass carafe upgrade, drink mixes, and the newer Coffee System — a one-button SCA-certified brewer paired with a sixty-setting grinder, praised by Trusted Reviews for "golden cup" results at a price that assumes the design premium travels.

The CO2 Ledger

The economics are where the premium meets reality. The machines take standard 60-liter CO2 cylinders — any SodaStream retailer will swap them, at roughly twenty-five cents a liter — which makes Aarke the rare premium appliance with cheap, universal fuel. Two frictions live here. The cylinder is not included in the box, adding a hidden first purchase, and Aarke's own exchange program, while convenient, has generated the store's most consistent paperwork complaints: refill subscribers report missing return labels, unanswered questions about where to send empties, and anxiety about being billed for cylinders they could not return because customer service never replied.

Design as the Moat

The design argument deserves its own ledger because it is the real product. There is no plastic housing, no LED display, nothing to charge — the Carbonator 3 is a machined object with a safety valve and a lever that reviewers describe as the closest a home unit gets to commercial bar equipment. Mashable found it "difficult to find flaws"; CNET scored it 8 out of 10. The machine's official rating sits at 4.8 stars across 270 reviews on the brand's own store, and the colorway drops — matte black, brass, seasonal finishes — function like fashion cycles, keeping a decade-old appliance design feeling current.

The Storefront Rules

The direct store on Shopify runs clean Scandinavian minimalism with clear terms: free shipping over fifty dollars, three-to-seven-business-day delivery with tracking, availability in more than thirty countries with regional storefronts, and installment options at checkout. The return policy is thirty days, but read the fine print — items must be unused and in original packaging, and return shipping is on you unless the company made the mistake. For a machine whose entire pitch is tactile, the inability to try the lever before committing is the store's structural tension.

The Retail Orbit

Buying direct is not required, and Aarke leans into the orbit: Amazon, Best Buy, and Crate & Barrel all carry the line, with retail sometimes undercutting the direct price during sales. The direct store's advantage is colorway access, bundles with bottles and drink mixes, and the purifier jug — a sleeper product the big-box shelves skip. Review aggregation across retail puts the Carbonator 3 near the top of every 2026 soda-maker ranking, usually as the "upgrade pick" above cheaper SodaStream models.

The Explosion of Complaints

Now the ledger the gloss hides. Trustpilot's distribution is a genuine split: 57 percent five-star against 31 percent one-star. The one-star file is operational, not product: parcels lost in transit with the company declining to investigate, emails ignored for two weeks across multiple channels, an order of a carbonator that arrived as a cylinder alone, a thirty-euro gas bottle that arrived empty, and — in the most alarming single review — a Carbonator 3 that allegedly failed to stop releasing CO2, causing injury, followed by silence from customer care. Notably, the five-star reviews often describe the same support team by name — Margarita, Maria — as outstanding, shipping free replacement parts by express courier. The pattern is geographic and logistical: Scandinavian elegance meets fulfillment reality, and the seams show during peak season. Product-level quirks round it out: the Pro's glass bottle dries slowly after dishwashing, cylinder-brand compatibility is not universal despite the standard claim, and carbonation can splash outside the bottle if over-pressed.

Still or Sparkling?

Aarke is the rare appliance store where the object itself is the argument — a decade-old design still winning best-in-class awards, fueled by twenty-five-cent cylinders, backed by a genuinely beautiful product wall. What you risk is the operation around the object: a support organization that is either a named agent sending free parts or a black hole of ignored emails, depending on the week. Buy the Carbonator 3 from a retailer if you want the safety net, direct if you want the full colorway wall — and whatever you do, order the cylinder with the machine.