Polestar has opened a pop-up snowroom in Finland.
That’s not a typo.
The electric vehicle maker’s newest retail location is built entirely out of snow — more than 105,000 cubic feet of it, harvested from a nearby ski resort. The cube-shaped building was constructed over just 20 days in Rovaniemi, which lies on the Arctic Circle.
The Polestar Snow Space is open until late February for consumers to book Arctic test drives of the Polestar 2 EV. At that point, Polestar will demolish the structure and return the snow to the ski slopes.
“The city of Rovaniemi is known for its wonderful design,” Martin Österberg, marketing manager of Polestar Finland, said in a statement. “We wanted to honor this by creating a beautiful work that was inspired by our brand’s minimalistic and pure design language. The choice of building material was easy due to the location and our desire to use circular materials: of course, it had to be built from snow.”
The building was designed by Polestar architects in the mold of the company’s minimalistic headquarters in Sweden and built by Frozen Innovations, a Finnish firm that said it has spent 20 years using snow and ice as unique building materials.
It’s 39 feet high and has walls 6.5 feet thick. The construction crew used wood and metal for molds and scaffolding but removed everything except the snow when it was finished.