We’re excited for the completion of Apple Campus 2, if only to see the amazing, time-lapse clip somebody is sure to cobble together from all of those in-progress drone videos. And the new facilities are so close to completion that the company has already started picking out furniture.
The main building is huge, and it’s going to need a lot of desks and chairs, sure. But it will also include some common areas, and Apple’s ordering up 500 custom-made “Pod Island” tables from Dutch manufacturer Arco to give its employees someplace to hang out, mingle, and collaborate.
And they look really cool.
The Pod Island tables will be similar the manufacturer’s already huge Essenza model, Design Milk’s Gregory Han reports (via Business Insider). That table costs €2,197 (about $2,500 U.S.) and is five feet long, but Apple’s thinking bigger: The ones in its common areas (called “Pods”) will be 18 feet long, four feet wide, and weigh 660 pounds each.
That’s 165 tons in total, in case you were wondering.
“These extra large Pod Island Tables by Arco are constructed from continuous sheets of solid Spesshart white oak sourced from the fairytale forests of Germany,” Han says. “There are no visible seams because of the company’s innovative manufacturing technique, which essentially peels away continuous single thin sheets of wood, which is then layered into a table top.”
Unsurprisingly, the seamlessness was Apple’s idea. Arco’s original plan was to construct each top out of two or three segments, but we all know how much Apple loves its clean designs.
“They challenged us to push the boundaries of our craft,” Arco designer Jorre van Ast says. “We got excited ourselves as well and started to investigate how to overcome the limitations inherent to the way we produce tables — not just here at Arco but for the entire furniture industry including our partners. Design, machinery, logistics, finding the right material… it all had to be reconsidered.”
In addition to these custom numbers, Apple Campus 2 will also contain 300 standard Essenza tables and 200 “other benches” for its 13,000 employees to use. And we really hope the company makes them use coasters around these things.
