To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
Friday, November 15, 2013
This Train Is Hiding A Full Starbucks Store Inside
What if you could sit inside a cozy Starbucks during your morning commute? Now, commuters in Switzerland can do just that.
Starbucks locations already seem to be everywhere you look. But
starting November 21, the company will take on a new frontier: trains.
Starbucks, with the help of Swiss train company SBB,
has converted a double-decker car running from Geneva Airport to St.
Gallen in Switzerland into a fully functional Starbucks store, complete
with wood tables, leather chairs, and, in another first for the company,
waitstaff.
Starbucks is no stranger to new concept stores. Strategically, its train is probably most like its mass-fabricated popup store.
It's an idea the coffee giant is putting into the wild to see if it
might scale because, while big storefronts represent the core of its
business, smaller, niche Starbucks offer an opportunity to expand
through unused, underserved cracks.
“It was not an easy project,” says Liz Muller, director of concept
design for Starbucks. “Our stores are made not just to have a wonderful
drink, but to connect and have a wonderful experience. We wanted to make
sure it feels like a club and that you could see a person across the
room, so the train feels more spacious.”
So the challenge was not just to fit a coffee counter into the
corner, but to pull in all of the elements we associate with Starbucks
into a stock mass-commuting platform. That meant accounting for weight,
electrical, and fire-safety requirements, of course, but it also meant
attaching all those windowed bar seats, shared tables, and the cozy
armchairs to the same skeleton of fasteners that seating inside a
typical train car would use. In other words, Starbucks architects had to
design a whole new social floor plan using the exact same anchors of an
old commuter-centric one.
“Just because it’s functional doesn’t mean it can’t be engaging,”
Muller says, “so we asked, ‘Why can’t we?’ Just because we’re on a
train, why can’t it be more comfortable?”
The team’s standpoint was one of naivety, since they'd never designed
for a train before, which led them both to learn things (like the
reason you don’t see wood tables on trains is because they’re considered
too flammable) and to create solutions (like bucking convention by
deploying them anyway). In this case, the solution was opting to treat
the wood to be flame retardant, plus use of thinner pieces wherever
possible (because less wood essentially equates to less kindling). That
approach still sounds simpler than it was, of course: Every table and
chair was designed and built from scratch and tested by regulators.
“You design a new chair, maybe one version is light cream and one in
dark cream,” Muller explains. “You build eight of each, they set them
afire, and if you have a high score, you pass.”
In the end, designers were able to seat 50 commuters at once--just
six fewer than a stock train car--while also having the same three core
seating arrangements you find in a Starbucks store for different
customers: Commuters just one stop from their destination may snag a
stool at the bar, while those on a longer journey could head upstairs to
sit in a plush armchair or at a shared “community table.”
“We wanted to offer you the ability to choose,” Muller explains. “If
your journey is short, you might choose to sit at the bar window. But
having a small community table creates the opportunity to use a laptop
or have lunch.”
Furniture aside, it’s all of the small touches that make the project
so compelling. The bottom floor was carpeted to absorb noise in the
space. Surfaces have clocklike maple inlays to acknowledge Switzerland’s
love affair with timepieces. A waiter takes and delivers an order
upstairs so that people wouldn’t need to claim their seat, run
downstairs to the line, and run back up--which Starbucks designers
witnessed happening in their own field research. (A waiter can also
serve the ground floor for good measure.) And in a very cool touch,
tables are treated to have a textured surface, plus they wobble the
slightest bit as a train comes into the station, to prevent spilling
your coffee.
In a world of travel increasingly chasing new ways to charge for a
few inches of legroom, Starbucks’s latest concept has certain promise:
that travel can still be as much about the journey as the
destination--assuming other companies make the effort.
“I wonder sometimes that our customers won’t understand truly what
this took,” Muller concludes. And, of course, they won’t, which is a
hallmark of any good design, isn’t it?