The Starbucks
Reserve Roastery
Every cup we’ve ever served has brought us here
By Liz Muller, Starbucks creative VP of global design
Since the opening of our original store in 1971 on Pike Street, we’ve had the pleasure of opening some beautiful spaces — but never anything like this. Just nine blocks from that original location, our new Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room celebrates our journey — as a company and culture. Here we capture and share our unreasonable passion for all things coffee, sharing the journey from farm to cup.
It has been an honor to work on this project. It is simply incredible to create such a unique experience like this for our coffee and share our world with our customers through the language of design.
The joy of the Roastery is in its scale—a 15,000 square-foot celebration of our story, heritage, and history.
It’s like the best chef in the restaurant tearing down the kitchen wall. You get to see everything, and it is important to us to share it in an authentic way. To pay tribute to the incredible amount of people and hard work involved in bringing that perfect cup of coffee to our customers.
When you walk through the vestibule, and look up, you’ll see beautiful Douglas Fir beams inspired by our stir sticks. When you put a stir stick in coffee, the edges become stained. We stained the edges of the beams darker to match.
The seating allows you to get a closer look at the design elements, and we maintained sight lines in every direction that excite and draw you through the space to explore more.
The magic copper kettle in the center of the space is hand-beaten and perforated with tiny holes in the shape of a world map. When sunlight filters down from the roof you can see this on the floor, Africa and South America and so on.
Copper pipes pull the roasted beans across the building from roaster to customer—so when everything is operational and the space is alive, you see the journey of the bean.
The drapes by the windows are pieces of art, inspired by the bottom of the cooling tray of the roaster. On the backs of the drapes you’ll see our coffee cherries, hand-embroidered in copper wire.
If you look at the sculpted balustrade you’ll see inspiration from when the farmers rake coffee beans on the drying patios. In fact that line pattern repeats all over the space.
The teak wood throughout the Roastery was chosen for a specific reason, the more you touch it, the more beautifully it wears. Everything is authentic and solid.
Each silo over the main bar has a unique shape to reflect the unique taste and character of the coffee it holds. These beautiful silos were designed by our team specifically for this space.
Everything you see in the Roastery was created for the Roastery, and all the furniture is 95% made in America by American craftsman. As always, that was very important to us.
When we first started this project, we wanted to manifest the labors of love that we put into our coffee growing, harvesting and roasting. It had to come through in the building, and we believe it truly has. Local artists have created and sculpted the dreams that make this place come to life.
It is love. That is what we aspire to capture here.
