It’s a little bit like Willy Wonka," says designer Liz Muller. It’s three days before opening and she walks me through the store while baristas, construction workers, roasters, and promoters bustle about, testing new pour-over spigots and inspecting read-outs from roasting equipment. Muller is the 52-year-old Dutch designer behind Starbucks’s most experimental stores, from a cafe placed inside an Amsterdam bank vault with a ceiling of 1,876 hand-carved blocks of wood, to coffee shop on a Swiss train with full table service. Today she wears gunmetal pearls and long coat with a bomber lapel. And she has an eager, aristocratic laugh, which she may or may not have inherited from her mother, who has joined us on the tour and sits quietly at the main bar as we explore.
"...And you will sit right here, and you can connect with the roaster," Muller says as she rubs her hands across the fine teak bar. "Then you go up here and there’s the sculptural balustrade—here comes the symphony pipes and it rains the beans.