This article explores the spatial experience of department stores, focusing on East Asian department stores in the early twentieth century. Firstly, I explore East Asian department stores as male intellectuals’ space and discuss how the department store played a role in circulating metropolitan exoticism and modernism globally. In East Asia, the department store was also related to configuring various images of urban men within familial boundaries: patriarchal tycoons, entrepreneurial brothers, disciplined children and a conformist head of the nuclear family. Secondly, this article examines human relationships in the space of the department store and the relationship between human beings and the space of the building. By focusing on the Renaissance architectural style, I discuss conservative masculinity and spatial characteristics related to the theatre and spectacle. Lastly, I explore concrete dimensions of bodily experience in the department store with the terms of “building machine” and “desiring machine.” In describing urban masses’ tactile experience of the technologically equipped building machine, I stress physical mobility and the unconscious. I approach “desire” from the perspective of political economy rather than configuring it in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis. By configuring both the space and its users as “machines,” I also challenge the subject-object binary. This study attempts to shift the critical focus on East Asian department stores from women, westernisation, and visuality to men, globality, and desiring machines.