Welcome To The Snowroom: Polestar Opens Frozen EV Retail Space In Finland

Polestar has taken electric car coolness to a new level, by building a retail space made entirely from snow.

Situated in Rovaniemi, in the north of Finland and just a couple of miles from the Arctic Circle, the building stands 12 meters (39 feet) tall, took three weeks to build and will function as a demonstration space for the Polestar 2 electric car until 26 February.

Inside, along with a Polestar 2, visitors will find ice sculptures representing the car’s wheels, brake discs and suspension. Like Polestar’s other 130 or so retail spaces, which are usually found in city centers, visitors in the Arctic snow space will be able to configure a Polestar 2 of their own, arrange a test drive, then complete the purchase online.

Refreshingly, Polestar staff are not paid commission, so there’s no pushy salesmen trying to get you to sign on the dotted line. Instead, visitors are informed then left to make their own minds up at home.

Sat in Kansalaistori square and coinciding with Arctic Design Week, the ‘snow space’ is built from 3,000 cubic meters of snow that was transported by electric truck from the nearby Ounasvaara ski resort. Once the space closes in late-February, the building will be dismantled and the snow returned to the resort.

The walls of the building are two meters thick and inside a reflective lighting panel sits below a domed ceiling. Although impressive in its own right, this shape also reveals how the cube was constructed.

First, molds made of wood and a steel frame are erected for the interior and exterior walls. These molds are then filled with snow, which is compressed to almost the same density as ice, weighing 800 kg (1,760 lbs) per square meter.

A semi-circular mold is inflated to create a domed interior roof that gives the building strength and stays in place once the mold is deflated and removed. The exterior of the domed roof is then covered with more snow to create the final cuboid shape, and the wooden molds are finally removed, leaving a freestanding snow structure behind.

Polestar says how the interior of the cube would usually be slightly warmer than outside, but on our visit to Finland the weather was unseasonably mild. This made the interior cooler, but stepping inside still meant a welcome respite from the freezing wild chill of a Finnish winter.

Outside, a bank of electric car chargers sprout from a block of snow, ready to top up the batteries of Polestar cars available for test drives.

The building was designed by architects from Polestar (the company’s Swedish headquarters is also a cube) and built by Finnish company Frozen Innovation.

“The purpose of Arctic Design Week is to highlight the arctic and responsible design. We are happy that this message was brought to Rovaniemi in the form of Snow Space and that the work turned out to be so spectacular,” said Taina Torvela, producer of the Arctic Design Week and design manager of the city of Rovaniemi.