This may seem strange but I basically grew up in a Starbucks store. Not literally, of course. But it’s been a fixture in my life from childhood to teenagerdom to adulthood.

Sarbucks' older design at Green Lake

My earliest memory of the now-global-chain is awaiting my cherry Danish pastry (sadly, no longer the same amazing recipe) at a Northgate location on special treat days before school when I was somewhere around age six. Mom would get a vanilla latte and I’d feel like the luckiest kid in the classroom.

Then, as a teenager, I liked to visit local coffee houses (many of which are now defunct) to study or socialize. But whenever I didn’t feel like driving to Capitol Hill for Bauhaus, Charlie’s or Cafe Septieme, I ended up in one place near my home: the University Village Starbucks.

On a cool summer evening, there was nothing better. Back in the good ol’ days, it was open until midnight and you could while the hour’s away over one venti latte. Since then, my relationship with the chain has varied. But needless to say, I knew the old Starbucks store well.

Starbucks\' new store design at the University Village

I say the old Starbucks store because Starbucks recently unveiled the new store. And man, are things different!

In place of standard walls and windows are movable glass walls that allow air to naturally ventilate the space and daylight to come in. In place of the blocky displays in the middle of the space and separated cafe area, is one big place with community tables, dark nooks and barista bars.

It’s funny but sometimes, a place has to change before you realize how outdated it was. When I visited the original store, it was just the store. But now, it seems to have been a very 1990s incarnation of the coffee house. Passing by the Green Lake location yesterday, I found myself comparing the store to the new location and imagining how much nicer it would be if the walls peeled back to allow total views of the lake. 

The interior of the new store

The new University Village store is sleek. It’s kind of sexy. It’s modern. And it’s got sustainable features. It’s got LED and CFL lighting, energy efficient hand driers, and water efficient features like dual flush toilets that will save 1,000 gallons of water per day. During construction, teams diverted 80 percent of construction waste from the landfill.

(Of course that still means 20 percent of construction material ended up in the landfill. Is a new design really worth the waste?)

The community table was repurposed from a fallen ash tree in Wallingford

The store’s biggest sustainability focus is in sourcing, reusing and recycling local materials. These materials in the store include slate from Garfield High School, redwood siding from hop vine poles in Eastern Washington, merbau wood from existing buildings, scrap leather from car and shoe factories, burlap coffee bags from a Starbucks roasting plant, Douglas fir from school bleachers and metal from old espresso machines.

It’s all part of the company’s goal to make Starbucks relevant to its community, and to turn it into a customer’s “third place” (if you just said third what? click here). Will it work? Will it be enough to lure you in? Should Starbucks be doing more or is this a good start? Did the space need to be redesigned in the first place or would it have been greener to have just stuck with what was there? Feel free to share your opinion, comments or personal memories below. I’d love to hear if you, like me, grew up in a Starbucks or if you didn’t hear about it until you were 45.

The design is only one element of what Starbucks is trying to do as part of its Shared Planet Strategy. For more information on that, go here.

For more information on Starbucks’ new design concept or the sustainability features of the store, read the story in the DJC.

An interior bar at UV that is dedicated to showcasing small batch coffee, and its stories

Tags: Architecture, Projects, Seattle

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Architecture, Business and technology, Green materials, Measuring performance, Projects, Seattle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.