Homesteaders' Cabins to Become Twitter Dining Room
Two 1870s cabins transported from praries to San Francisco dotcom HQ.
March 4, 2014 -- Twitter's new San Francisco headquarters on Market Street (a re-purposed 1930s building) soon will get a dining room made from even older structures: Two wooden, weather-beaten 1870s cabins uprooted from the Montana plains, disassembled, shipped to the city and re-assembled inside Twitter's HQ.
Where homesteaders might once have eaten beans and bacon (on a good day) tweeters, in their current cafeteria, can order off a four-course tasting menu, which was listed in a corporate tweet as "pork belly arancini, swordfish, quail and a bread pudding oh yeah."
Olle Lundberg of Lundberg Design, who came up with the idea re-purposing the cabins, told the Marin Independent Journal that in a few weeks Twitter employees will be able to hang out in these genuine Old West relics, which still bear the adze marks of the ranchers who built them.Oscars most buzzed-about moments on social media
Lundberg bought the structures for an undisclosed price from Karl Beckmann of Novato, Calif., who tells ABC News that his firm, Beckmann Engineering & Design, has made a minor specialty of wood salvage.
"One cabin, I believe it's fair to say, was uninhabitable, sitting in the middle of a cow field," says Beckmann. "The other, located near Stanford [about half way between Lewiston and Great Falls] had been lived in by a rancher. It was just sitting out on the open prairie. Originally, these two would both have been homesteaders' cabins."
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According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Lundberg's plans call for using the two 20 X 20-foot buildings more or less as paneling. They would be conjoined, with built-in corner tables and booth seating added. 20-somethings can talk bits and bytes where the pioneers shivered.
The irony, however, goes only so far: Beckmann says that whoever was living in the Stanford cabin in 1943 wasn't exactly starving: He left behind him, in the attic, a suitcase full of stock certificates.
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