A new Barnes & Noble store in Kirkland, Wash., is opening today, Patch reported. Located in The Village at Totem Lake shopping center, it is the first new B&N store to open in the Seattle area for more than a decade.
B&N has said that Kirkland store marks a "dramatic change" in appearance compared to other locations, and store manager Dave Rossiter and his team will have a lot of leeway in curating the store's inventory. There are particularly large children's and young adult sections, and the new shop also features an in-store cafe.
The Seattle Times said that the 8,200-square-foot store doesn't have "straight-line rows of shelves, but room-like nooks for each genre. Within those nooks are thousands of books, a small selection of DVDs, puzzles and gift items, and a cafe." The paper compared the store, one of the new-design B&Ns, with indie bookstores, noting, among other things, its handwritten shelf talkers, unheard of under the old B&N regime.