The first official Apple Bangkok store is now trading, located in the heart of the new US$1.6 billion IconSiam project.

Queues formed overnight as Thai Apple fans vied to be among the store’s first customers and the company says “thousands” of shoppers visited the store in the first day of trading on Saturday.

Inside Retail understands Apple’s designers, London-based Foster + Partners, worked with the architecture team from IconSiam to make the store stand out from the centre’s curved river-facing facade. The result is a clean, open square profile fronting a large outdoor courtyard, giving the store a ‘high-street feel’ despite being inside a larger mall structure.

The interior features living trees and floor to ceiling glass facing both into the mall and out of it.

For opening weekend, the store hosted local band Polycat performing live and the company also gave its iconic Apple logo a Thai-style makeover to celebrate its debut in the country.

A second Apple store is under construction in the basement of the CentralWorld shopping centre in downtown Bangkok.