Microsoft Open West Campus Cafés

Microsoft has opened its West Campus Commons, an onsite “town center” for the exclusive use of its employees that includes 14 restaurants as well as retail outlets offering a variety of products and services.

Located in the Redmond, WA, corporate campus's West Commons area (site of the former Eddie Bauer headquarters just west of Microsoft's main campus that the company acquired in 2004), it is part of the “My Microsoft” initiative to develop a new kind of workplace designed to encourage communal activity and ease the burden on employees of everyday tasks like banking, shopping and laundry.

The Commons, designed to mimic a village commons in the midst of West Campus's four office buildings, includes a post office, credit union, bike repair shop, salon, spa, cellphone store, card shop, even a sports equipment rental store adjacent to a series of sports fields and courts. It also has a 1,000-person conference center.

The restaurants are outlets of local brands and offer a variety of cuisines. They include Spitfire, a pub with alcohol service that groups of employees can reserve for set blocks of time for afterwork socializing.