Ohio Is Home to a Seven Story Office Building Shaped Like a Giant Basket

Most office buildings blend into the skyline without a second glance. But there is one building in Ohio that stops people cold the moment they see it.

It looks exactly like a giant woven basket, complete with two massive handles arching over the top. This is one of the most unusual pieces of architecture in the entire United States, and it sits right in the middle of a small Ohio town waiting to be discovered.

A Building That Looks Like It Came Straight Off a Store Shelf

Most people do a double take when they first see it. The Longaberger Basket Building in Newark, Ohio, located at 1 Market Square, Newark, OH 43055, is a full-scale replica of the company’s Medium Market Basket, scaled up to an almost unbelievable size.

The building stands seven stories tall and stretches about 180 feet long by 116 feet wide.

The exterior is designed to mimic the look of woven wood, and the detail work is genuinely impressive up close. Two massive steel handles arch over the top of the building, each one heated in winter to prevent ice buildup.

The Longaberger Company, known for its handcrafted maple wood baskets, commissioned the structure as its home office. It opened in 1997 and quickly became one of the most photographed buildings in Ohio.

Nothing else in the country looks quite like it.

The Vision Behind the Basket Shape

The idea for a basket-shaped building came directly from Dave Longaberger, the founder of the Longaberger Company. He reportedly told his architects exactly what he wanted and refused to budge when they expressed doubts.

His vision was simple: the building should look like the product that built the company.

Dave Longaberger grew up in Dresden, Ohio, and turned a small family basket-making tradition into a national direct-sales business. He believed the building would serve as a statement of pride for the brand and a landmark that would draw attention for decades.

Architects at NBBJ designed the structure to match his request as closely as possible. The result was a building that challenged conventional construction methods and required serious engineering creativity.

Dave passed away in 1999, just two years after the building opened, but his bold idea lives on every single day.

How Engineers Actually Built a Giant Basket

Building something shaped like a basket is not a standard engineering project. The structure required custom-designed exterior panels meant to replicate the look of woven wood without using actual wood on the outside of a seven-story office building.

The weave pattern was created using a specially textured material that catches light the way real basket strips do.

The two handles are made of steel and weigh about 150 tons each. They are not purely decorative.

Engineers designed them as structural elements that also include internal heating systems to keep ice from forming and falling onto people below during Ohio winters.

The building itself contains about 180,000 square feet of office space. The interior was functional and professional, designed to support a large corporate workforce.

The challenge was making the outside look like a craft object while the inside functioned like a serious office environment. The engineering team pulled it off remarkably well.

What the Building Looks Like Up Close

Seeing photos of the Longaberger Basket Building is one thing. Standing in front of it is something else entirely.

The scale is genuinely surprising. The woven texture on the exterior walls creates shadows and depth that shift throughout the day as the sun moves across the sky.

The handles arc high above the roofline, giving the building a silhouette that is unmistakable from a distance. Up close, you can appreciate just how much detail went into making the surface look authentically basket-like rather than like a flat printed image on a plain wall.

The building sits on a fairly flat piece of land, which means nothing blocks your view of it as you approach. There is no dramatic hillside backdrop or surrounding forest to compete with.

The basket just sits there in the open, looking completely matter-of-fact about the whole situation, which somehow makes it even more striking.

The Longaberger Company and Its Basket-Making Legacy

The Longaberger Company was not just a novelty business. At its peak, it was one of the most successful direct-sales companies in the United States, with thousands of independent consultants selling handcrafted maple wood baskets across the country.

The baskets were made in Ohio and became collector’s items for many American households.

The company was founded in 1973 by Dave Longaberger in Dresden, Ohio. Each basket was handwoven by American craftspeople, and many styles came with fabric liners, lids, and protectors sold separately.

The brand built a loyal following that stretched well beyond Ohio.

At its height, the company employed thousands of people and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. The basket-shaped building was a physical expression of that success.

It told the world that a small-town Ohio basket company had grown into something worth celebrating with a seven-story monument to its own product.

The Interior of the World’s Biggest Basket

The inside of the building was designed as a fully functional corporate headquarters. The seven floors contained office space for hundreds of employees, meeting rooms, and all the standard features of a modern business facility.

The interior did not try to look like the inside of a basket, which is probably a relief for anyone who ever worked there.

Natural light played an important role in the design. Large windows were incorporated throughout the building to bring in daylight despite the unusual exterior shape.

The building’s footprint, while basket-shaped on the outside, still provided a workable floor plan on the inside.

The atrium areas and common spaces reportedly reflected the company’s Midwestern roots, with warm tones and practical layouts. For employees, it was simply where they came to work every day.

For visitors passing by outside, it was one of the most surreal office buildings they had ever seen in their lives.

Newark, Ohio and Its Connection to This Landmark

Newark is the county seat of Licking County in central Ohio. It is a mid-sized Midwestern city with a long history rooted in manufacturing and industry.

The presence of the Longaberger Basket Building gave Newark a piece of architecture that no other American city could claim.

For locals, the building became a source of genuine community pride. It was the kind of thing you could point to and say, without any exaggeration, that your town had something truly one of a kind.

Visitors made the trip specifically to see it, and that tourism attention mattered to the local economy.

Newark sits about 35 miles east of Columbus, making it accessible from a major metropolitan area without requiring a long drive. The surrounding region has its own history and character, but the basket building put Newark on maps it would never have appeared on otherwise.

That kind of visibility is hard to put a price on.

The Building After Longaberger: What Happened Next

The Longaberger Company faced serious financial difficulties in the years following Dave Longaberger’s passing. The business gradually declined, and the company eventually vacated the basket-shaped headquarters.

The building sat largely empty for a period of time, which felt strange given how much energy had gone into creating it.

Various proposals emerged over the years about repurposing the building. Its unusual shape made it challenging to convert for other uses, since not every business wants to operate out of a structure that looks like a giant woven container.

The building attracted ongoing attention from developers and preservationists alike.

The story of what happens to iconic but financially troubled buildings is always complicated. The Longaberger Basket Building became part of that conversation in Ohio real estate and preservation circles.

Its architectural significance was never in question, even as its future remained uncertain. The building continued drawing curious visitors regardless of who owned it or what happened inside.

Why Architects and Designers Still Talk About This Building

The architecture world has a complicated relationship with novelty buildings. Some get dismissed as gimmicks.

Others earn genuine respect for the technical ambition required to pull them off. The Longaberger Basket Building falls firmly into the second category for many design professionals.

The challenge of taking a three-dimensional woven object and scaling it up to a functional seven-story structure required real problem-solving. The exterior cladding, the structural handles, the floor plan that works inside an irregular footprint, and the heating systems built into the handles all represent engineering and design decisions that went far beyond surface decoration.

The building is often cited in discussions about novelty architecture or programmatic architecture, a style where the building’s form reflects its function or brand identity. Whether you find it charming or bizarre, the craft behind its construction is hard to dismiss.

It remains one of the boldest corporate architecture statements the Midwest has ever produced.

The Heated Handles: A Detail Most Visitors Miss

Most people who visit the Longaberger Basket Building focus on the overall shape and walk away satisfied. But there is a specific detail worth knowing before you go: those giant handles are heated.

During Ohio winters, ice and snow can accumulate on large elevated structures, creating a serious safety hazard for anyone walking below.

The engineers who designed the building solved this by installing heating elements inside the steel handles themselves. The system keeps the surface warm enough to prevent ice from forming and falling onto the ground-level areas around the building’s entrance.

It sounds like a small thing, but it reflects how seriously the design team took both the visual ambition and the practical responsibility of the project. A building that looks like a basket but drops ice on visitors would have been a very different kind of landmark.

The heated handles are proof that form and function genuinely coexisted in this project.

Visiting the Basket Building Today

The Longaberger Basket Building remains one of the most photographed roadside attractions in Ohio. Even without an active business operating inside, the exterior draws a steady stream of curious visitors who make the trip specifically to see it in person.

Pulling up to the building for the first time never gets old, no matter how many photos you have seen beforehand.

The best views come from the street level directly in front of the building, where you can take in the full scale of the structure without anything blocking the sightline. Early morning light hits the woven texture on the exterior walls in a way that makes the building look almost warm and tactile despite its size.

Bringing a camera is an obvious call. The building photographs beautifully from almost every angle.

It also makes for a surprisingly fun stop on a road trip through central Ohio, especially when traveling with people who have never heard of it before.

The Scale That Makes Your Brain Do a Double Take

Numbers help explain the scale, but they do not fully prepare you for the experience of standing next to this building. The structure is approximately 160,000 square feet.

The two handles rise well above the roofline, adding significant height to an already tall seven-story building. The whole thing is designed to look like a medium-sized basket that a company might sell, just multiplied by an almost absurd factor.

When you stand at the base and look up, the handles seem to disappear into the sky. The woven pattern on the walls, which looked like a fun design detail in photos, suddenly reveals itself as a massive architectural surface covering thousands of square feet.

That moment of recalibrating your sense of scale is something photographs simply cannot replicate. It is the main reason people who have already seen the building online still feel compelled to make the drive to Newark and see it standing in front of them.

What This Building Says About American Ambition

There is something genuinely American about building a seven-story office shaped like the product your company sells. It is bold, a little over the top, and completely committed to its own logic.

Dave Longaberger did not build a tasteful corporate campus with subtle branding. He built a basket.

A real, recognizable, giant basket.

That kind of confidence in a product and a brand identity is rare. Most companies play it safe with their headquarters.

Longaberger went in the opposite direction and created something that people are still talking about and visiting decades later.

The building stands as a reminder that the most memorable things are often the ones that ignored conventional wisdom. Whether the Longaberger Basket Building makes you laugh, stare in disbelief, or genuinely admire the audacity behind it, one thing is certain: you will not forget it.

And in a world full of forgettable buildings, that counts for quite a lot.