Sit anywhere you want
Real estate company CBRE has remade its own offices in Williams Tower.
CBRE, a global real estate company that’s made a science out of helping Fortune 500 companies get their headquarters right, has completed a consolidation of its Houston offices into a high-tech workplace with no assigned desks.
More than two years in the making, the 77,000square-foot office in Williams Tower is the largest to date of the Los Angelesbased firm’s 50 so-called Workplace360 offices. It is named for CBRE’s Workplace practice, which helps clients reduce costs while promoting flexible workspaces, collaboration, technology, employee wellness and the company’s brand.
Employees pick a spot, whether it’s a desk in an open work area, a reserved “office for a day” or on a couch, depending on what they’re working on.
The office, which is 22 percent smaller than the three former locations combined, is outfitted with technology that enables employees to pick up and plug in anywhere. Lockers store personal items.
“It’s activity-based workspace,” senior managing director Cody Armbrister said on a tour Thursday. “As real estate professionals, the job changes hour by hour, and sometimes minute by minute. Rather than having one size fits all, our idea is to say the work space needs to be adaptive to allow the work environment to support what the professional is doing.”
The office, designed by Gensler, houses nearly 300 employees. The bulk of the space — spanning about 50,000 square feet with ceilings up to 18 feet tall — is on the fifth floor, with portions of the second and fourth floors connected by new stairs.
The Houston office pays homage to notable local sites and names, starting with its William P. Hobby Boardroom.
Custom black and white wallpaper in various huddle rooms and focus rooms shows scenes of places such as Memorial City and the Grand Parkway, with an occasional CBRE real estate sign.
The fifth floor is divided into four “neighborhoods” organized around CBRE’s different lines of business as well as Houston’s geography. Green tones in the carpeting of the North section are reminiscent of nature in The Woodlands, for example, while red accents in the South neighborhood represent brick around the Rice Village and Museum District neighborhoods.
Armbrister likened a polished concrete path around the fifth floor to Loop 610. It is bordered by wood floors made of post oak, which represent Post Oak Boulevard.
To get ready for the move, CBRE held purge parties with pizza, beer and a contest for the oldest document, a letter from 1969. The new office boasts an 80 percent reduction in paper, after purging 7 million documents and scanning 250,000. There are 399 file drawers, down from 1,800.
The technology includes Liquid Galaxy, with seven connected screens spanning nearly the length of the room, to help clients visualize CBRE research such as the best places to put a retail store using Google Earth.
“It’s a great tool for our professionals to communicate what the market looks like,” Armbrister said.