There's a way to configure it to display one of the internal pages of wordpress in the settings, but my intention is to display a grand different .html static page as the homepage of it.

Any way to do it?

Do you want this to be done often or just in preparation, for, say, a traffic boost?

If the latter, you can create one and use your .htaccess to set up a redirect.

Ok, lots of hoops, but you could set a new default page in your .htaccess file like this -

# declare default page for "/"
Directoryindex welcome.html

This will let you install WP normally and then use a new file that WP does not use as the default page for that directory.. The welcome.html will be your landing page and you can then build your own menu system to get to the blog portion of the website..

Feydakin thanks .. that is really a nice tip