HOM Furniture built a flagship megastore in Bloomington to house all three of its brands — HOM Furniture, Gabberts and Dock 86 under one roof; construction began on June 1, 2019 with store opening in May 2020. The site more than doubles the size of the current location – from 100,000 to more than 212,000 square feet, making it the company’s largest store.
The development marks the greatest improvement for Gabberts as it moves from the Galleria, a high-end mall in Edina, MN where the furniture store has been for 60 years. The HOM store now at that Bloomington site will be razed to make way for a new 212,000-square-foot structure. The new complex will resemble one that the company has operated for several years in Little Canada, MN just outside Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The new Gabberts showroom is two stories and larger than the existing store in Edina. A two-story HOM store and single-level Dock 86 share an entrance but are in separate stores. The Bloomington flagship will be about 40,000 square feet larger than the Little Canada location.
The new flagship is the largest furniture store built in the U.S. in the past five years, when Nebraska Furniture Mart opened a Texas-sized 560,000-square-foot store in Dallas.
HOM has 17 locations in the Upper Midwest. HOM ranks as one of the nation’s largest furniture retailers serving customers in the Upper Midwestern states of Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin.
The owner’s goal in building a new flagship furniture store along the busy Bloomington, MN 494 interstate was for passers-by to take notice of a unique and beautiful building. The owner was familiar with all the benefits of precast concrete insulated wall panels since he had built is Coon Rapids, MN furniture store in the 1990’s with precast. The challenge was to fashion an exterior façade that would look like no other building in town. In the end, a precast concrete insulated wall panel with a custom form-liner finish provided the unique façade he was after to make an architectural statement of exceptional quality. The precast insulated wall panels maintained the project tight budget and aggressive construction schedule.
Wells produced and erected nearly 60,000 sq. ft. of precast for this new megastore. The exterior façade includes architectural insulated wall panels that boast beautiful white panels with a unique abstract formliner pattern. The lower portion of the panel is a black mix in a stone look formliner pattern. |