Last year in December, Starbucks opened in New York City the forth of the six planned Reserved Roasteries around the world, following Seattle, Shanghai, and Milan, the upcoming stores will be on Tokyo and Chicago. With all this new experience, Starbucks is looking to go beyond of the regular coffee shop, involving the customer in all the different processes of how to make coffee, and offering another perspective of the regular way of consuming the ancient beverage that dates back to 800 A.D.
“New Yorkers are sophisticated, so we didn’t want to hit them on the head [with NY references],” Starbucks Roastery concept design vice president Jill Enomoto says.
The three floor, 23,000-square-feet includes five bars: two for coffee, and one each for cocktails, takeaway beans, and pastries. The space here is full of New York design details spread across a working coffee roaster, tubes in the ceiling that carry freshly roasted beans to the coffee bar, an intern garden with coffee plants, 10 bathrooms, and a big variety of coffee brewing elements, including: Expresso machines, Grinders, Kyoto-style cold brewers, ice brewers coffee, classic plain old drip coffee brewers, nitro and drafts dispensers, among others.
This industrial looking place doesn’t need a lot of decoration since all the copper and glass elements of the equipment in contrast with the rustic wood of the counters and furniture (all the furniture was designed and made in the U.S.) are visually rich enough. Brooklyn artists Yolande Milan Batteau and Max Steiner made custom wallpaper and a geometric siren sculpture, respectively.
