Apple has, for the first time, publicly acknowledged plans for a new store in Seattle and given an opening date: June 30.
GeekWire has been closely tracking plans for the store, which will be adjacent to the current location in the University Village mall, for more than a year. The new store dwarfs the current location and reflects Apple’s new aesthetic of building unique standalone stores.
PREVIOUSLY: Apple’s striking new Seattle store, cloaked in secrecy, appears almost completed
A recent permit document filed with the city shows the store takes up about 14,000 square feet of the 23,000-square-foot site that used to be parking, with about 8,000 square feet of sales area. The current location is across a parking lot from a Microsoft Store, but the new Apple Store will be right on top of its rival tech giant.
Apple opened the University Village location in 2003, approximately two years after the company opened its first brick and mortar locations. In 2011, Apple revamped the store, though it stayed the same size. University Village is one of six Apple Store locations in Washington state. There have been persistent rumors over the years of a potential downtown Seattle store, but so far those plans haven’t materialized publicly.
The open-air mall has in recent years become a hub for tech companies opening brick and mortar stores. It started with Apple, and then Microsoft opened its store in the mall in 2011. In 2015, Amazon made University Village the home of its first physical bookstore. The latest is a showroom for Elon Musk’s Tesla, which opened earlier this year.
