For more than 80 years, this character has taught children to be free, brave, and a little rebellious — no moral lessons, just strength and imagination. A classic like this also carries a risk: how do you bring it into a physical space without reducing it to a cardboard backdrop?
The answer couldn’t be “decorate”. It had to be “live”.

You don’t build a set about Pippi. You build the world she lives in.

Starting from the client’s brief, Alcateia’s process was simple to state and hard to execute: you don’t build a set about Pippi — you build the world she lives in.
Each zone was designed to represent a scene or a value from the books — strength, mess, creativity, curiosity, sharing — rather than simply serving as a photo backdrop. Play is the starting point, not the reward.
Pippi’s world wasn’t the theme. It was the place.

An eight-zone trail, anchored by the entrance portal and the Villa Villekulla house.

In Pippi’s kitchen, nothing happens the way you’d expect: pancakes fly through the air in a game of aim (Pancake Toss), and pots and pans come to life as musical instruments through a contact-sensor system that reacts to touch in real time (Kitchen Orchestra).
Further along, the floor stops being safe: a jumping and balance course turns every step into a small triumph (The Floor Is Lava). Next to it, a workshop with no rules or templates invites visitors to paint, mould, and build freely (Imagination Workshop), and a slime lab lets the youngest guests mix colours and textures their own way, in 20-minute sessions for groups of 8 (The Sticky Recipe).
One of the most photographed moments is the replica of Pippi’s horse, fitted with a system that measures, in kilograms, the strength of whoever tries to lift it — so everyone can feel, for a moment, what it’s like to be the strongest person in the world (Pippi’s Strength).
The trail ends in a reading corner designed for books to pass between visitors instead of sitting still on a shelf (Story Corner), and in a giant replica of a Pippi book, facing outward from the space — accessible to passers-by even without entering the trail, the most spontaneous invitation in the whole project (Inside the Book).

We don’t measure success in visitors alone.

We measure it in the queues to lift the horse, in hands sticky with slime, and in books that change hands at the reading corner. Still, there’s one number that helps tell this story: more than 23,500 people visited the event, confirming that a good story can still make a family stop in the middle of their day.