The “Microsoft Destination” concept is a breathtaking vision for a Microsoft store

The Fifth Avenue Apple Store is rightfully an impressive display of architectural design, but who’s to say no one can do better. A marketing pitch by advertising agency JWT to Microsoft reveals a breathtaking conceptual retail store that would certainly make an impression for Microsoft in retail – much more than the current Microsoft Stores.

Posted by John Doyle to his creative portfolio, the pitch describes “a destination that celebrated the pulse of inventive thinking, conceived on PC’s, around the world. A place for conferencing, education, and retail that displayed the best of inventive thinking.

The renderings detail a stretched two-level structure with flowing curved glass walls and roof, resembling the sides of the Windows logo which also makes a grand appearance towering over the entire store.

Inside, the top level resembles a contemporary museum with an entire wall panoramic imagery. In the middle, large touch panels surround a globe with visualized projections (which Microsoft already has). Following the helix-like stairs, below-surface enhouses a retail area and a presentation room the size of a small movie theater.

Those who has visited Microsoft’s Redmond campus might be familiar with the Microsoft Visitor Center, a showcase of a much smaller scale. Clearly Microsoft has a lot to show for and be proud of, they just need to present it, well, outside of their own walls.

Head over to the portfolio page for more pictures. Be prepared to wipe your drool.

14 insightful thoughts

  1. If Microsoft build a structure like this, base it on a muesum and not a retail store. Build it to be fantastic, engage people and lift the profile of Microsoft and not to look at the bottom line of a retail store. Use it to build the brand, not sell boxes.

  2. weird that a company so wealthy hasnt done that long before already. sure its costly, but the bucks have to be spent anyways 😛

  3. Ugh, seriously? Almost everyone can come up with a breathtaking pleasure palace for a store. “It has solid marble staircases with solid brass handles! The walls will all be a single sheet of glass that becomes transparent or opaque at will! We’ll add a moat of flowing mercury around it! The employees will retreive items from the shelves by flying up with jetpacks! There’ll be a gigantic holographic head of Bill Gates over the entrance greeting each customer by name.” The trick is designing something breathtaking that is actually affordable. This design has “let’s go crazy without being constrained by boring stuff like budgets or attainability” written all over it.

  4. Maybe I’m the only person who doesn’t like this design. It’s too random. That giant Windows logo just looks wrong there. And why even a Windows logo? Is it about Windows or Microsoft? It does look more like a cinema rather than a place for coming together with the help of technology.

    1. I don’t like it either. I’m not the biggest fan of modern architecture, it always looks better on a computer screen than in the actual world, where it somehow doesn’t look as elegant because it doesn’t have the glossy finish.

      But besides that, I think there’s such a thing as appropriateness and overkill. They design it to look like its supposed to be this grand awesome shrine to the technological age .. but all you’ll you’ll see inside is Windows and XBOX. The Windows logo is made to look like its some important standard-bearer of civilization and technological progress, while its just a corporate logo used to sell a product.

  5. Doesn’t it resemble the Apple Store in China? Their entrance is a glass cylinder. Even though it is different, I can’t help thinking it is a copy me better approach, which is rather subjective.

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