Twitter has a case of cabin fever.
The social networking company is planning to install two log cabins in its headquarters in San Francisco. The cabins date back to the late 1800s, according to the Marin Independent Journal, and will be used as a dining area for employees.
The idea started with Lundberg Design, one of the firms that designed the space at Twitter's headquarters when the company moved there in 2012, which was looking for ways to divide up Twitter's dining space.
"It's a big dining area, but a relatively low ceiling height, so how do we divide up the space and make the scale feel better," Olle Lundberg, an architect with the firm, told Mashable. "We came up with this idea of rooms within larger rooms."
Or, more accurately, log cabins within larger rooms.
In fact, the idea for a log cabin started two years earlier when Lundberg was searching Craigslist for materials and stumbled across a listing from "a guy in Sonoma" who was looking to sell off some log cabins. "I just sort of stuck the thing in a folder," Lundberg said. Four months ago, he reached out to the seller and was told that the log cabins were no longer available, but "he knew of some others in Montana."
While it might sound more than a little bit odd for a tech company in the middle of a city like San Francisco to embrace materials associated with the outdoors (and another era), Lundberg notes that this has long been a theme of the office. Twitter uses reclaimed woods in its office and, under Lundberg's direction, has repurposed other random materials, including part of a bowling alley which was used to make the reception desk.
"The forest has always been a nice image for them," Lundberg said. "They like wood. They like rustic." He also notes that there is the "corny tie to the bird," meaning Twitter's logo.
Twitter, for its part, emphasized that it likes to recycle materials whenever possible.
"We're very excited about this project, not only because it's beautiful, but also because it's another great instance of how we continue to re-use materials as we build out our presence," Jim Prosser, a representative for Twitter, said in a statement.
If nothing else, it will give new meaning to employees logging out.