On the road outside it's a typical Beijing scene, grimy and chaotic, with cars and buses grinding by and fleets of bicycles carrying workers wrapped up against the cold.
But through the glass doors of the large new building lies another world entirely. It is a world of space and minimalism, a dust-free universe of monoculturalism, a depository of global bourgeoisie consumerism. It is Ikea.
The world's largest furniture and household goods retailer has opened its first store in the Chinese capital and things will never be the same - for me and for millions of Beijingers. Before now, everything in Beijing was uniquely Chinese.
Even the western-type restaurants and shops and malls and designer outlets of recent years seemed to have Chinese characteristics of one kind or another. But to step inside the Swedish store on the Third Ring Road is just like going into an Ikea in Washington or Glasgow or any one of its other 149 shops worldwide.
Here are the same brightly coloured sofas and armchairs, the same spotless Scandinavian kitchens, the same gate-leg tables and foldaway beds, the same bookcases with anodised aluminium frames, the same steel CD racks, the same birch planking and white wood picture frames and bright cushions.
This is the west with Swedish characteristics, and it has been a sensation since it opened on December 17th.
In the first full week, 90,000 people came to look, and the numbers have been growing all the time. Last Saturday week 30,000 Beijingers trooped through the three-storey emporium, and on Sunday 25,000 more.
"It has become the place to spend an afternoon," said the store manager, Mr Gordon Gustavsson. "Instead of going to the park they come here and walk around inspecting everything, sitting on the sofas, chatting, drinking tea, eating biscuits. Afterwards it's like a tornado went through the store."
Ikea usually replaces display furniture two or three times a year but in the Beijing store it has had to do so several times already because of wear and tear and street dust brought in by customers.
"The Chinese people are very curious," he added. "They take down an item and look at it closely, to see how it's made, what goes into it."
A reporter from China Youth Daily asked Ikea's public relations officer, Ms Xu Lide, if some extra-curious visitors might not be Chinese competitors preparing to copy Ikea products, but she replied: "We are not afraid of competition. Ikea will update and upgrade 20 per cent of its stock every year with endless new products and concepts."
I remember my own first visit to an Ikea store, a monster outlet at Potomac Mills near Washington DC, from which I furnished a whole house in 1991, and for me it was a culture shock then.
The biggest impact was on discovering that everything I wanted from the displays had to be collected in flat-pack boxes from an adjacent warehouse and then assembled at home, chair leg by chair leg.
This concept is new to the Chinese too. So is the idea of paying full price at a checkout desk in a furniture store.
"Can't you bargain down the prices?" asked my companion, a sophisticated young Beijing graduate more accustomed to the practice of haggling over chairs and tables in a typical Chinese furniture store.
Most of the customers are from Beijing's new middle class, smartly dressed couples aged between 25 and 40.
"I like the quality, and the bright colours," said a young businesswoman in perfect English as she examined a multi-function living space with a bunk bed raised to two metres to allow a work space underneath.
"Unfortunately my ceiling is just two metres high," she sighed, rolling up the measuring tape Ikea provides for every visitor.
A retired engineer sitting in an armchair thought the prices too extravagant and accused the store of making too much profit.
One in four visitors ends up buying something, said Mr Gustavsson, and this compares well with the average of one in three worldwide. "When you have this amount of people, they don't have to buy so much," he added happily.
The most popular items at the Beijing store are cheap picture frames, floating candles, slippers, and, surprisingly, sofas. Expatriates had been coming in large numbers too, their eyes getting even more round as they enter what is a living museum of western consumerism with over 5,000 kinds of household goods.
One feels that a bridge - assembled from flat-pack boxes and made from lacquered pine, of course - has been thrown across the great cultural cleavage of modern times, that between the globalisers and local customs.
One long-term foreign resident, eyeing incredulously a shelf full of Scandinavian confectionery at the checkout bistro, said: "This is definitely the last step in the westernisation of China."