1 · Position
Thirty thousand square feet at HKRI Taikoo Hui, twice the size of the only other Roastery in Seattle, behind thick wooden doors curved like a roasted bean. Two floors of roasting, packaging and brewing done in front of the customer — coffee as theatre — with a two-storey copper cask, three handcrafted bars, a jade tea bar printed in 3D and a ceiling of ten thousand hand-carved hexagonal tiles. Rocco Princi baked on site, his first work in China.
2 · ⚑ Why it belongs in this group
It is a factory operating as a shop, and the Library has only one other of those: Eataly, LHL-S-258 Eataly, which opened its Turin market in a dead vermouth factory and put a school inside it. Both answer the same question — how do you sell a commodity at a premium — with the same answer: let the customer watch it being made. The augmented-reality layer goes one step further and adds a narration only visible through a phone, which is the newest thing in this group by a decade.
3 · ⚑ The address
789 West Nanjing Road is also The Louis — LHL-S-184 The Louis. Two of the most ambitious brand-experience buildings on earth stand in the same development, eight years apart, and the Library holds them adjacent for that reason. HKRI Taikoo Hui itself is LHL-S-247 Taikoo Hui, Guangzhou in the mixed-use group, still unwritten: a development whose tenants have entries before it does.
4 · Candour
A store opening in China every fifteen hours is the context the Roastery exists to answer: it is a prestige object built by a company whose actual business is volume, and the register states that rather than treating the Roastery as representative. Starbucks announced a USD 20 million social commitment over five years alongside the opening, which is recorded as announced.