Starbucks Has Opened A Stylish New Shipping Container Coffee Shop

Starbucks has opened a stylish new coffee shop in Hualien City, Taiwan but there's something different about this location.

It has a drive-thru and seating inside, but that's pretty typical for most Starbucks locations. This particular location is unique because it is built out of shipping containers. The new location wanted to experiment with sustainable design concepts by reusing 29 used shipping containers to create the 320 square meter space that's two stories tall. Shop Tiny Homes This innovative coffee shop was designed by Kengo Kuma and was inspired by coffee trees and modern architecture. Inside, there are 3,455 square feet to use for seating and for the barista centre. They designed it to help bring people together to enjoy coffee and to create comfortable and intimate areas for people to sit and relax. There are also beautiful views of the gorgeous mountain range, and then another area tells coffee stories through art. Starbucks has already built around 45 prefabricated shipping container outlets in the United States making them more sustainable and readily available options. Installing one of these prefab Starbucks coffee shops takes much less time than building a brand new shop from the ground up.

The company has an environmentally-friendly Greener Stores framework, which is aiming to build 10,000 greener Starbucks stores globally by 2025.

Kengo Kuma has also built a Starbucks store in Fukuoka which is in southern Japanese and the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Tokyo, but those two projects were not built using shipping containers. Even though designing and building with shipping containers can be a challenge, they can offer some significant benefits. They can be stacked on top of eachother which in the case of this coffee shop creates a taller main floor ceiling. They can also easily integrate skylights to allow for more natural light in the building reducing the costs of lighting during the day. The colourful murals on the walls of the interior of this coffee shop also help to brighten things up a lot, and they show the heritage and culture of the Sakiraya Taiwanese aboriginal people. They also added in some really comfortable and homey seating areas as well which create nice little nooks where people can sit and converse.

Along with the use of recycled materials in their new buildings, the company wants to save $50 million in utility costs alongside the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Starbucks is moving in the direction of sustainable coffee, that is served sustainably in sustainable and comfortable environments. Not only will this be great for the environment, but it will also reduce their overall costs to operate which may mean more money for the workers and maybe they could reduce the prices of their coffee too, you never know. Starbucks isn't the only one using recycled shipping containers in building; there are plenty of homes that are being built using these steel containers. Many people are building tiny houses and cottages using the steel containers as well as larger homes too. The wonderful thing about these containers is that they can be added onto if more space is needed. Just add on top of or beside the existing containers to expand the space within the home. If you like the appearance of these shipping container homes and buildings, you might want to look into building one of them yourself or having one built on your property. There are places where you can purchase these used containers for around $3,000 or so depending on where you buy them from. What do you think of these new Starbucks locations? Do you think that they should start building all Starbucks locations like this now?