It’s only been a year and a half since Andre Kim (BFA 07 Env) signed on as a senior concept design manager at Starbucks. But the young environmental designer’s creative sensibility has already had a transformative impact on the java giant’s shifting identity. In a bid to compete with the surging success of high-end craft coffee boutiques (hence those ubiquity of long lines of Gen Y hipsters patiently awaiting their $6 pour overs), Starbucks set out to create the ultimate coffee fetishist’s fantasyland in the form of a new flagship retail experience in Seattle, designed by none other than Kim.
Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room is the Apple Store on steroids—or, more accurately, on a venti quadruple shot Frappuccino. But by taking his cues from the performing arts, Kim has created an environment that’s both larger than life and intimate at once. “It is an amphitheater of coffee,” Kim told Sprudge, the coffee news and culture blog. In practice, the Roastery, as it’s called by Starbucks faithful, more closely resembles a tastefully appointed coffee-themed amusement park ride, with its lounging areas, coffee library, pizzeria, extravagantly appointed coffee bar, marble table and merch store.
The overall messaging embedded into this monument to the curated cup of coffee has much to do with Starbucks’ desire to highlight its cred as more than just a corporate coffee conveyor belt installed in every airport and strip mall in the civilized world. Rather Starbucks is showing its bones as an artisan roaster in the skin of a multi-billion dollar Goliath. “The point was to make it as a transparent and approachable as possible…,” Kim told Bloomberg News, “and show how meticulous we are about bringing coffee to customers.”
Rave reviews have been pouring in from both Startucks diehards as well as from business and design tastemakers. FastCo Design has dubbed the gargantuan LEED certified repurposed former car dealership a “Willy Wonka factory of coffee.” Thrillist called it a “playground for coffee nerds and average joe drinkers alike.” In the end, Starbucks’ high-stakes bet to stake its claim to a seat at the head of the specialty coffee table seems to be paying off thanks, in no small part, to Kim’s spellbinding environmental design.
