Inside an anonymous warehouse on a Northampton industrial estate stands a mocked-up high street. The street, complete with pedestrian crossing and yellow lines, separates two full-sized branches of Barclays bank. One is slightly dilapidated, as experienced by many customers across the country; the other is a glitzy experiment. The result is a transformation in the bank's high street presence, a Tesco-style makeover with the designs tested here to be rolled out nationwide. The first branch to benefit from these designs opened in Manchester this month.

Getting customers into branches is vital for banks. It is at the counter, not on the internet, that the most expensive financial products, such as insurance and investments, are sold. Banks have tried several times to make their branches more attractive, but have had mixed success. In 1999, Abbey did a deal with Costa Coffee to turn branches into miniature coffee shops. The concept lasted five years before being scrapped by Abbey's new Spanish owner, along with the reviled pink colour scheme brought in by the previous management in an earlier rebranding exercise.

As Abbey was getting rid of Costa, HSBC was opening new airport lounge-style Premier branches for its wealthier customers. Lloyds TSB is capitalising on the influx of Polish workers with an “international store” in Manchester, where everything is available in multiple languages.

The Barclays update began when it hired Deanna Oppenheimer almost three years ago to shake up its sleepy British retail business. The American was known for making Washington Mutual funky by launching Occasio, a chain of Starbucks-style open-plan branches, complete with khaki-clad concierges and play areas equipped with Gameboys. A sexier Barclays was always on the cards.

At the beginning of last year, Ms Oppenheimer poached Helen Dodd, a retail design expert, from Tesco.

Ms Dodd, who has spent 20 years working out how to attract customers to shops and keep them there, trooped 250 Barclays customers and staff through the Northampton warehouse to test the new layout and technology.

Nothing was sacred, not even the good old British queue with the black tape barriers. The new Manchester branch is experimenting with a ying-yang-shaped queue, broken up by waist-height pillars housing computer games. The branch's space-age information desk is pure Apple store, while, according to Ms Dodd: “We're trialling a lot of different queueing methodologies - people do PhDs on this stuff.”

The childrens' play area is inspired by the Science Museum. There is no glass separating tellers from customers, to stop people from raising their voices, something that Ms Dodd believes makes banking more stressful.

Curves are used to make customers feel “warmer”, while the glass frontage will make women more inclined to enter. “At the moment, they don't feel welcomed into branches,” Ms Dodd said. Concierges, dressed in uniforms by the designer Jeff Banks, will issue customers with tickets telling them how long they must wait and even if they would be served more quickly if they went to another branch.

Getting the right doormat was key - customers like dry feet, so Ms Dodd found a mat that dried wet soles within four steps. The Manchester branch operates to the same timetable as other retailers, with late night and weekend opening.

The biggest of Barclay's 1,700 branches will get a facelift in the style of the Manchester branch, while smaller outlets will receive some of the new features. Ms Dodd compares the branches to Tesco superstores. “This is Tesco's Extra, it's got everything in here,” she said.

Occasio has not been an unmitigated success - some complain that branches are confusing and that queueing is worse - but eight years since the launch Washington Mutual is still rolling them out and this year the bank was No 2 on Fortune's list of America's most admired mortgage companies.

Abbey, on the other hand, has given up trying to look like a retailer. Its mantra is location, location, location, positioning new branches next to popular retailers so that it can benefit from the passing trade. A spokeswoman said: “If you manage to get a spot next to a shop like Primark, people do just pop in”.

— Barclays is close to securing a capital injection of about £4 billion from key strategic investors, including state-backed investment funds in China and Singapore. The bank, which is keen to shore up the strength of its balance sheet but loath to pursue a rights issue, is understood to have spoken to a handful of potential and existing shareholders. These include the China Development Bank and Temasek, an investment fund owned by the Singapore Government.

Barclays will expect investors to pay a premium to last week's closing share price of 318p. Subject to due diligence, a private placing is expected to be secured over the next fortnight.

The bank declined to comment.

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