Starbucks Channels Old-World Mysticism In New Big Easy Store

THE COFFEE COMPANY EVOKES EARLY 1900S MERCHANT CULTURE FOR ITS LATEST OUTPOST IN NEW ORLEANS'S FRENCH QUARTER.

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Starbucks has opened a new store in New Orleans that's designed to channel the mystical feel of the city itself. Evocative of an early 1900s apothecary, the store is latest in Starbucks's portfolio of hyper-local shopsaimed at being part of a neighborhood's culture, rather than disturbing it.

“We discovered New Orleans’s history as an import-export shipping port,” says Andrew Bello, a design director for Starbucks. “There was a time [in the early 1900s] when it was the largest coffee importer in the area.” Bello and his team ran with their imaginations, designing the space as if it were the home and store of an old-timey merchant. Floor to ceiling shelves sit behind the register. Back then, Bello says, “those shelves would be filled with boxes and bags and herbs and spices--and coffee.” Today, of course, they’re stacked with bags of Starbucks coffee.

A mix of local and Atlanta-based artists created a mural, wrought iron chandeliers, and a hanging mobile of brass jazz instruments. The details were deliberately handcrafted--right down to the lettering on the bathroom door--in part because the new outpost belongs to a growing portfolio of stores that have what Bello and Starbucks designers call, “local relevance.” 

STARBUCKS ISN’T INTERESTED IN BEING THE MCDONALD’S OF COFFEE. 

The philosophy behind “local relevance” is that a trip to Starbucks can be a more faceted experience than just getting a reliable cup of coffee. Even simple actions like a customer posting a picture of the store to Instagram, or actually telling a friend about a visit to Starbucks, are measurements of this. “Hopefully customers discover something new when they return to the store,” he says.

Put differently: Starbucks isn’t interested in being the McDonald’s of coffee.

Instead, Bello wants to take advantage of the high-traffic, high-profile location. “Everyone that goes to New Orleans is going to walk down that street. It bifurcates two parts of the city: the downtown business district, and the gentrifying warehouse district.” The goal? Let tourists be on vacation, and make locals feel at home, all in one place.

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The Doctor's Office Of The Future: Coffeeshop, Apple Store, And Fitness Center

As health care reform starts to reshape how we think about wellness, we're going to need new medical spaces that help encourage more healthy behavior. See where the doctor will see you.

WRITTEN BY Sarah Bader

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As Americans try to figure out what changes the Affordable Care Act will bring to their lives and pocketbooks (and politicians continue wrangling over the rollout), here's one that probably missed everyone's radar: the new experience that could be waiting for people in their primary care doctor's waiting room.

Think: library-coffeehouse. That reception area could be redesigned and turned into a place where elite health information is free-flowing along with a few choice and, of course, healthy libations.

Intelligentsia Coffee, Chicago, IL. Image courtesy Gensler, photographer: Joe Liesky

Or the space might be used to host live, in-person "chat rooms" for people with the same chronic disease or lunch hour "work the kinks out" exercise sessions for office workers with lower back pain.

None of this exists, yet. It's a vision of the future from the architects and designers in the health care sector at Gensler, where we've been thinking holistically about the doctor's office and how it might be used to transform both the patient's experience and the business of doctoring.

We suspect doctors are doing the same--and especially primary care physicians. Once the unsung generalists in a world of increasing specialization, primary care physicians (a.k.a. internists and general practitioners) have been recast by the health care law as the front line in a new war to keep Americans healthy and out of the hospital. We're moving from a health care system that pays providers a fee for service (encouraging volume of services) to one that rewards good outcomes and value. Those (doctors, hospitals, health care systems) that keep patients well and motivate them to stay healthy are the Affordable Care Act's winners.

And there's a special asterisk on those primary care physicians. Winning for them means running lots faster. Doctors will have to see many more patients during the course of a day, given a slew of new cost pressures and increasing competition from retail clinics, drugstores, and even the big box stores, all of which are already chipping away at the general practitioner's profits by turning basic health care services into a consumer good.

Martin Luther King Medical Center Campus, Los Angeles, LA. Image courtesy Gensler.

Put all those facts together and what primary care physicians have is a mandate to reinvent themselves. They must get into the business of managing people's health, not their disease. They have to work at the "top of their license" (face time with patients reserved for services that only a doctor can provide). And they have to figure out how to "see" patients in new and different ways.

To do all that, their physical space has to change. Doctors will need to start thinking like merchants and in terms of squeezing profitability out of every square foot. As architects and designers who view "space" as a tool to solve problems and make life better and more interesting, we reimagined the doctor's office as a cross between a vibrant retail space and serious medical office building. What if:

DOCTORS' WAITING ROOMS LOOKED AND FUNCTIONED MORE LIKE COFFEEHOUSES

People who may not have anything in common could come together for the experience of partaking health care information. Gone are the rows of chairs and old issues of Golf Digest and Self. Instead, patients hunker down at tables and have easy access (either electronically or via printed materials) to the latest research on cholesterol-lowering medications or on Celiac disease or to home safeguarding techniques that help prevent the elderly from falling, etc.

DOCTORS' OFFICES WERE MORE LIKE AN REI OR APPLE STORE

People with the same agenda would meet to share information or talk to someone at the (doctor's version of Apple's) "Genius Bar"? Perhaps the office hosts (in-person) "chat rooms" for people who suffer from Crohn's disease or diabetes or obesity and makes a nurse or other clinician available to answer questions and facilitate the discussion.

DOCTORS' OFFICES WERE FITNESS/WELL-BEING CENTERS

30-minute "unplug" sessions are held during the lunch hour (or after work or after moms drop the kids off at school) and devoted to stress management techniques, deep breathing exercises, posture improvement, gut redux, etc.--and all of them led by a health care professional other than the doctor.

DOCTORS HAD SMALL BRANCH OFFICES

These could be located throughout a metropolitan area or in rural areas so patients didn't have to travel so far. And perhaps, they "see" the doctor via high technology: a video screen and monitors that feed the patient's current health metrics/readings directly to the doctor.

The point is the doctor's office no longer can just sit there as a container for people waiting to be diagnosed. As the new health care law gains traction with its mantra of value, doctors are likely to see the value in their office space and transform it into a dynamic place where patients come not only for a doctor's exam but for access to high-quality health care information and experiences that they can't get anywhere else. That's the value of a primary care physician in America's new health care order.

The Gross Secret Behind Star Trek's Old Costumes

GENE RODDENBERRY THOUGHT SPANDEX WAS THE TEXTILE OF THE FUTURE. WRONG.

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Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was nothing if not utopian. In his original vision for the science-fiction series, Roddenberry imagined a future in which a generation of space hippies went forth as explorers into a strangely psychedelic cosmos to bring peace, brotherhood, and free love to all. In this future, there would be no war, no money, and everyone could get as drunk as they wanted with no consequence.

But by the time Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted on TV in 1985, Roddenberry's vision of the future encompassed more than peace, love, and harmony. It also included Spandex. In this archived interview with the BBC, Bob Blackman, the costume designer behind the show's iconic uniforms, talked about the problems that Spandex caused the cast and crew and how he used design to fix it.

SPANDEX UNIFORMS MADE THE CAST LOOK LIKE FUTURISTIC INSTRUCTORS OF SPACE AEROBICS.

Joining the show in the third season, Blackman found the costume department of The Next Generation to be a smelly and unpleasant place. When Roddenberry launched the show a couple years previously, he had told his costume designers that Spandex, the super-stretchy artificial fabric so synonymous with the '80s, was also the preferred fabric for the clothes of the future. But Roddenberry's forte was sci-fi, not fashion, and his textile of the 24th century was a disaster in the 20th.

For one, it was incredibly uncomfortable. "Jumbo, or Super Spandex, whatever you want to call that heavier weight stretch, will stretch from side to side or top to bottom, depending on how you cut the garment," explains Blackman. "So the costume would dig into the actors' shoulders, wearing them 12 or 15 hours a day." This resulted in many of the cast members developing back problems.

In addition, Spandex is particularly unflattering unless your body is perfect. "Spandex is unforgiving, so if you have any sorts of body issues, they are there."

Add to this the fact that the material bunches up, resulting in at least one curious legacy: to keep his outfit from riding up, actor Patrick Stewart, who played the Enterprise's Captain Jean-Luc Picard, began tugging it down during filming. This habit became so well known that it ended up being one of his character's most beloved tics, known by fans the world over as "The Picard Maneuver."

But perhaps the most offending characteristic of Spandex was the stenchthat confronted Blackman when he first took over The Next Generation'scostuming department. "Spandex retains odor, so there is a certain part where if you’re wearing them for a long period of time, you can’t really clean all the smell out, and it becomes a little bit annoying. And it also retains the odor of the dry cleaning fluid. It is, on a day-to-day basis, unpleasant."

THIS HABIT BECAME SO WELL KNOWN THAT IT BECAME KNOWN BY FANS THE WORLD OVER AS THE PICARD MANEUVER.

So Blackman threw out the Spandex uniforms in favor of wool gabardine, which allowed him to cast The Next Generation's crew in a more noble and adventurous light.

"When you want the characters to look heroic, there are certain things that you must do to make them seem that way: broader of shoulder, narrower of hip, as vertical as possible, chest out, ready to go after evil," says Blackman. "At the beginning of that third season, you will see that the uniforms change structure, eventually ending up with an Eisenhower-esque mandarin collar that leaves black yoke and angled color panel on the front, but removes all of the piping, making them essentially, more formal and dignified."

Spandex uniforms made The Next Generation cast look like futuristic instructors of space aerobics, but the new uniforms gave them an almost naval dignity. Still, years later, the legacy of The Next Generation's earliest spandex uniforms could still be felt: in 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis, Captain Picard was still uselessly "tugging" down on the bottom of a uniform that had long since been redesigned to stop bunching up.