An old homesteader cabin salvaged by Novato contractor Karl Beckmann. It is now a dining room in the new Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Provided by Karl Beckmann 
 
 WHAT'S NEW IS old at Twitter's new San Francisco headquarters. 
 
 The high-tech firm has a new look for its old logo, a new office in an old building and, in a few weeks, new dining rooms in some very old log cabins. 
 
 In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. 
 
 In a few weeks, Twitter employees will be able to eat and hang out inside these old west relics, which still bear the adze marks of the ranchers who built them 100 years ago. 
 
 Karl Beckmann loads lodgepole boards into his truck in Novato, Calif. on Friday, February 21, 2014. Beckmann Engineering is re-purposing two old homesteader cabins from Montana that are to be reassembled in the new Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.(James Cacciatore/Special to Marin Independent Journal) James Cacciatore 
 
 "You can see the hand of the original craftsmen who built them," said Olle Lundberg of Lundberg Design, the San Francisco architectural firm responsible for the specialty design elements in the new office. "It's kind of cool that cabins that were built sometime in the 1800s have now reappeared. The guys who built them are long dead, of course, but are sort of still here. I kind of like that." 
 
 Lundberg bought the cabins for an undisclosed price after seeing an ad on Craigslist placed by Novato contractor Karl Beckmann, who salvaged them from a couple of remote ranches in small Montana towns. 
 
 "We advertised them for a year and we pretty much got a lot of crackpot calls," Beckmann said. "When you think about it, buying a 100-year-old log cabin that has been exposed to the elements is not a very practical idea unless you're doing something exactly like what is being done here." 
 
 Lundberg, who lives in a decommissioned Icelandic car ferry docked at Pier 54 in San Francisco's Mission Bay, had already reused wooden planks from the lanes of an old bowling alley, with some of the original nails still visible, to build the reception desk in Twitter's main lobby, which features real tree branches sandwiched between layers of glass. As wall decor, blue Twitter bird logos have been fashioned out of vintage California license plates, and # and @ symbols have been routed into slabs of raw wood. 
 
 In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area. The 20-by-20-foot cabins serve as rooms within a room, adding intimacy to the impersonal space. And the fact that they're built of old lodge pole pine logs fit into his overall woodsy design scheme. 
 
 An old homesteader cabin salvaged by Novato contractor Karl Beckmann. It is now a dining room in the new Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Provided by Karl Beckmann 
 
 "We've used the notion of the forest as a nice tie-in with Twitter and its bird logo," he explained. "To me, the log cabins fit into that since, obviously, they're made from logs that come from the forest. It's also about using natural materials. There's something nice about the character of the real wood. Visually there's a patina of age. It isn't something fake. It's real. It's reclaimed. It's got some history to it, just as the building has history to it. One of the nice things about reusing old materials it that there is a story that comes with them." 
 
 For Beckmann, owner of Beckmann Engineering and Design and Beckmann Construction in Novato, the story of the cabins began several years ago, when he was approached about buying them from someone in Montana who learned of the company's sideline business in salvaged wood. That's when Beckmann put the ad for them on Craigslist, thinking that nothing would come of it until Lundberg, who had filed the ad away on the off chance he might need some old log cabins some day, finally answered it last summer. 
 
 "At first I was concerned it was a scam," Beckmann said. "How often does it happen that you get a call to install two log cabins inside a building? This is a once-in-a-lifetime-type job." 
 
 Once he was convinced that Lundberg was for real, he had the cabins taken apart in Montana and shipped to a company yard in Vallejo, where they were put back together. When some of the logs turned out to be too rotten to reuse, new ones were milled on the site out of the same kind of lodge pole pine as the originals. 
 
 The cabins were then taken apart again and trucked to Twitter's new office on three floors of 1355 Market St., in what has been a seedy downtown area known as the "Mid-Market" neighborhood. 
 
 Once the cabins are installed at Twitter, booths will be built inside them for company employees to sit in while they eat or chat or watch four TV monitors on a concrete pillar in the center of the room that also serves as a coffee station. 
 
 "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 of Twitter media relations said in an email statement. 
 
 Twitter's presence has not been welcome among all segments of the city's population. Members of San Francisco's largest city employee union recently picketed the new headquarters, demanding an end to the $1.9 million in tax breaks Twitter and other high-tech firms have gotten from the city. 
 
 While Twitter was outfitting its new office with a yoga studio, a rooftop garden, an arcade and other amenities that could be viewed as extravagant, another band of protesters used the building as a starting point for a march down Market Street to protest the city's growing economic inequality. 
 
 Lundberg hopes the cabins and the other re-used materials he's repurposing "humanize" the company in the eyes of its detractors. 
 
 "You can buy a great piece of design like an iPhone," he said. "And yet that doesn't in any way define us. But when you have these one-of-a-kind things, they really do begin to say who you are. And hopefully this does that for Twitter, that it makes them a little different than any other tech company." 
 
 Contact Paul Liberatore via email at liberatore@marinij.com; follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LibLarge. Follow his blog at http://blogs.marinij.com/ad_lib. ||||| Twitter’s cafeteria at its Mid-Market office is about to get rural. 
 
 Two century-old log cabins from Montana were disassembled and carted to Vallejo this week, where they were refurbished and re-sized in preparation of being installed at Twitter’s headquarters this week. 
 
 “Literally, the last logs are headed over there right now,” said Olle Lundberg, whose firm designed the project. 
 
 Lundberg, who has helped design Twitter’s offices “since they were 40 people,” said he wanted to find a way to break up the space in the company’s second dining area. 
 
 “We’re doing a second dining space because they’ve expanded so much, but the problem is all the floors are 10-foot ceilings,” Lundberg told The Chronicle. “That’s really a miserable space. It doesn’t feel good. The scale is way off. How do you subdivide the space without making it a series of rooms?” 
 
 Repurposed log cabins, of course. Lundberg got in touch with a Novato construction company run by Karl Beckmann, who knew of two Montana cabins that might work with the strict specifications — the rooms had to be 20 feet by 20 feet. 
 
 Beckmann, who had been in the salvaged-wood business since 2008, hadn’t yet found a good buyer for the cabins. “Most of the responses were not very realistic,” he said. But he was impressed with Lundberg’s designs and made the offer. 
 
 Lundberg was sold (for an amount neither he nor Beckmann would discuss). 
 
 The second cabin salvaged by Novato contractor Karl Beckmann, destined for Twitter’s offices. (Courtesy Karl Beckmann) 
 
 “We’ve always had this sort of notion of the forest being a source of inspiration for design at Twitter — obviously there’s a link to the bird,” Lundberg said, referring to the company logo. “They like warm, natural materials. The forest was a nice story, a nice way to link to that palette.” 
 
 The cabins’ exact history is unknown. Lundberg guessed they were from the 1870s and were originally used as residences, though by the time they were reappropriated for Twitter they functioned more as sheds. 
 
 “There’s a real history of craft on these structures,” he said. “They were probably cutting down the trees that were right on the site.” 
 
 Before arriving at Twitter headquarters, some of the more rotten logs were replaced by new ones, so the final products are a mix of new and old. 
 
 The two cabins will be installed without roofs and with 7-foot-wide open doorways on all four sides, Beckmann said. They’ll be lounge spaces with built-in corner tables and booth seating, Lundberg said. 
 
 “For Twitter, it’s just not something you can buy out of a catalog,” Lundberg said. “It helps to personalize and humanize the space.”
– The tech world is lousy with impressive employee perks, but this is certainly a unique entry in the category: Twitter employees will soon be able to eat lunch in one of two century-old Montana log cabins. As the San Francisco Chronicle explains, the cabins were taken apart and shipped this week to Vallejo, Calif., where they're being "refurbished and re-sized" in advance of their installation in Twitter's new San Francisco headquarters. Designer Olle Lundberg, whose firm is handling the project, explained that "we've always had this sort of notion of the forest being a source of inspiration for design at Twitter," and the forest connection provided a "nice story." But it was the awkwardness of the new dining area that led to the decision. "The problem is all the floors are 10-foot ceilings," explains Lundberg. "That’s really a miserable space. How do you subdivide the space without making it a series of rooms?" Enter the 20-foot by 20-foot log cabins, which were purchased for an undisclosed price and will be erected without any roofs and with 7-foot-wide entrances on each of their four sides; booths will be built in. It's not the only perk workers in the new office will have access to, per the Marin Independent Journal. Among the others: a yoga studio, arcade, and rooftop garden.