A group of twentysomethings are laughing around a rooftop fire-pit overlooking sailboats on Seattle’s Lake Union. A team of software engineers huddles round a laptop while sipping lattes in wingback chairs. And a tiny Boston terrier is running around squeaking a squeezy toy.

Amazon’s first-ever public tour of its Seattle headquarters offers a very different view from the toxic workplace depicted in last year’s New York Times exposé. There’s not one person crying at their desk, and not a single burned-out “rank and yank” reject being tossed from the building by burly security guards.

Which is probably the point. Amazon’s corporate culture has not had the best image over the last few years, from its downtrodden temporary warehouse staff to digital workers toiling for pennies in cyberspace. The company is famously secretive, unresponsive to critics and journalists alike. But it is not, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos believes, a bad place to work.

In response to the Times piece he wrote: “I don’t recognise … [this] soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard.” Now everyday Amazon customers can judge for themselves.

I didn’t find a golden ticket for Amazon’s inaugural tour in my latest delivery of kid’s diapers, nor did I camp out overnight like an Apple fan, pre-iPhone launch. On Tuesday afternoon, I heard they were offering tours beginning Wednesday and I signed up online. There were still plenty of spaces.

By the time the current expansion is finished, Amazon will occupy more than 15%​ of Seattle's inventory

This first tour group turns out to be an assortment of tech fans and tourists. A father had brought his son into the city for a summer holiday treat. A few smartly dressed jobseekers strive to impress the tour guide with their can-do attitudes, while a middle-aged Chinese couple straight off the plane seem thrilled to be exploring the home of their beloved Kindle.

Our sparkling tour guide, Alli, does her very best to parse Amazon’s rapid but curiously undramatic rise to global domination. In the absence of a charismatic founder or epic power struggles, Amazon’s history is framed instead by small idiosyncrasies that, like the company itself, have scaled to monstrous proportions.

Here, she explains, is an entire building named after Amazon’s first workplace dog, Rufus. She continues: more than 2,000 dogs now come to work at Amazon with their owners. Here is another glass slab called Wainwright, after the company’s first customer. An estimated 54 million people are now signed up to its Prime delivery service. By the time we get to buildings named after internal software testing tools, I am glazing over slightly.

A staff breakout area at Amazon’s Seattle HQ Photograph: Mark Harris

Something like 20,000 Amazon workers live and work in downtown Seattle. By the time the current expansion phase is finished – complete with a pair of 100ft high bio-domes full of exotic plants – Amazon will occupy more than 10m square feet of office space, or more than 15% of the entire city’s inventory.

Most of these buildings are only a few years’ old at most. They appear to be beautiful work environments, full of daylight, art, ping pong tables, rooftop rain gardens and soaring plazas with artificial streams trickling through. The diverse workers seem young and fairly happy: either the brainstorming whiteboards in the lifts were cleaned before our visit or this isn’t a very sweary crowd.

While our guide doesn’t want to point out the office of Jeff Bezos (“Security” we are told, darkly) or talk about upcoming projects like drone delivery, we do hear of some Amazon failures. A bear skeleton from Amazon’s ill-fated eBay rival, Auctions, looms menacingly over one of the campus’s 15 coffee shops. “This is a great company to fail in!” says Alli with a grin.

A demo robot ‘picker’ at Amazon HQ in Seattle Photograph: Mark Harris

There are goodies, too. We are whisked to the 11th floor of another post-industrial edifice to visit Amazon’s “free book” room and told to help ourselves. These are advance reading copies of new releases, not yet available to buy. Our group is unaccountably sluggish to embrace the literary Supermarket Sweep. Were they expecting an Echo instead?

Our final stop is a miniature mock-up of an Amazon fulfilment centre. Free of guilt-inducing human workers, this small glassed-in area showcases Amazon’s warehouse robot Totey (“Because it picks up tote boxes!”). We press a button on a little touchscreen and Totey whirs into life, picking up a box and presenting it to the group – a multimillion dollar version of a claw grabber arcade game. We all get an Amazon-branded gadget charger and stationery set.

With that, the tour is over. We are directed to another recent PR effort, a community banana stand offering free fruit for all, every weekday from 8am. Over a banana, I ask my fellow tour members what they thought of it all. “Everything’s very upbeat,” says Deborah, out for the day with her daughter Aubrey. “Although I didn’t necessarily see a lot of people playing ping-pong, it was more aesthetically pleasing than I thought. I was expecting something much more closed in.”

Could tours of Amazon could ever compete with Seattle’s more famous attractions, like the Space Needle or the first Starbucks store? “I could see that,” says Michael Perera, a freelance writer. “Especially if it’s free, done in an hour, and you get free bananas at the end.”