Century-Old Department Store Converted into Creative Office Hub

In a former historic Ames & Brownley department store in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, a local company is sewing together a tapestry of complementary tenants — creative companies, tech startups and freelancers — in one building ecosystem.

The 50,000-square-foot multi-tenant office campus, dubbed Assembly, is intentionally designed to bring together like-minded companies, offering them shared resources, amenities and common spaces, and access to each other for connection and collaboration.

The concept was launched by Norfolk digital marketing agency Grow, which purchased the building from the city in January 2020 and now occupies its second floor (you can read about Grow's individual suite here). While looking for its next office space, the company knew that it wanted to expand its business alongside other local, similar businesses with aligned goals, and so led the charge in renovating the century-old building and recruiting complementary tenants to bring its vision to life.

Currently, Assembly hosts a business startup and incubator studio, a tech company focused on augmented reality, digital marketing agencies, a nonprofit group dedicated to coastal resilience challenges, a structural engineering firm, and Work Program Architects (WPA), which worked in conjunction with interior design firm Campfire & Co. to design and build out the Assembly building. There is also a first-floor suite dedicated to hot desks, and a few suites still available for lease at the time of publication.

By bringing together similar businesses in a shared space, “each company becomes stronger — making the collective greater than the sum of its parts,” Campfire told LoopNet.

In fact, WPA is such a believer in the office community concept that it decided to move its own studio into the building, renting its new suite at two and a half times the rent cost of its previous space.

“We were early collaborators with Assembly’s developers through a nonprofit group called Re:Vision Norfolk, which aimed to attract and retain talent through placemaking,” said WPA. The architecture firm described taking a risk on moving its studio into Assembly, citing that the value of the community outweighed the risk of expanding during the pandemic. “We knew that it would pay off in making our team feel supported and inspired, and it would foster relationships and knowledge-sharing with all of the incredible companies in the building,” added WPA.

Visibility and connection were the two driving factors that informed the layout of the building from the beginning, said WPA. With glass-walled individual suites arranged along a mezzanine around the atrium at the building’s core, leading to communal lounge spaces, a shared kitchen and meeting rooms, the building is meant to promote connections and accidental collisions between different tenants.

“As tenant spaces front the atrium, each floor has a window into the work being done in the building,” said WPA. “Part of what makes the building cohesive is that work and process are on display.”

WPA said that by centrally locating the staircase in the atrium, which is where the department store’s original elevators were located, and making it a focal point of the building, “all tenant space can be oriented with views towards the atrium and stairs, allowing tenants to be inspired by the work of their peers or curious about how other tenants might have a role in their projects.”

WPA found other unique points of contact to the staircase as well — the office suite occupied by Grow incorporates a patio balcony complete with porch swings that overlooks Assembly’s atrium and stairs.

“It’s like a quick, secret getaway spot with custom swings that allows someone to take a quick break and enjoy people-watching without fully leaving the comfort of the Grow office,” said WPA.

Intentionally oversized landings are meant to serve as platforms for conversation, encouraging tenants to stop and engage in an otherwise high-momentum space.

The staircase leads tenants to a variety of zones for all kinds of work — communal lounge seating, private spaces like phonebooths for focused work, and bar-height tables for gathering, whether over a work conversation or just lunch. “There is a banquette, phone booth, couch, or nook for every version of work and play,” said Campfire.

Another key amenity of the space is the rooftop terrace open to all tenants, which doubles as an indoor-outdoor event space with a movable wall that opens to the patio.

Incorporating indoor bike storage and showers was also a must for the Grow executives and visionaries behind Assembly, who worked to develop and promote cycling in the City of Norfolk. “ The same criteria that helped establish bike lanes, on-street bike storage and greater awareness of the cycling community in general was carried into the design criteria for the building,” explained WPA.

The architects didn’t want the Assembly building to feel like your traditional run-of-the-mill office space, instead seeking to create a warm and cozy atmosphere akin to a boutique hotel.

Every detail in the building pays homage to the 1910-built historic Ames & Brownley department store, without playing into the theme too seriously. “The key features of the interior design are meant to feel at home in a historic space without replicating or mimicking the exact details of the building’s early 1900s era,” said Campfire. “As occupants and guests enter the building and then move deeper inside and up towards the roof deck, they will notice a subtle but intentional gradient from classic design elements to more modern details.”

The interior design theme was influenced by the historic elements of the building, both existing ones that the designers wanted to celebrate and new additions that were informed by original finishes. There was a raised data floor throughout the building, but WPA sourced samples of the original historic floor below it to inform the finish choice.

“The new atrium stairs, handrail and other wood elements matched the wood species of the existing floor, but modern maple did not have the same depth as the 100-year-old flooring,” WPA explained. “The flooring subcontractor created a series of samples for review before a tinted, water-based sealer yielded near identical results to the 110-year-old flooring. The intent of the study was to make the modern elements blend with the historic elements, so the line of old and new could be blurred... allowing new elements to look like they were always part of the building.”

Custom terrazzo floors curated by the design team also laid the groundwork, literally, of the building and its interior palette. Campfire said the designers “originally explored wood flooring for the ground floor of Assembly before coming to the conclusion that rising seawater levels and the increasing flood risk in the building’s future meant that a more water resistant and durable material was the way to go,” paving the way for what the firm says is its bespoke “Goldilocks” of terrazzo flooring.

The rest of the interior design color palette was inspired by “the textures, fabrics, and colors found in classic mens’ suiting,” akin to those the department store might have sold in its height, said Campfire. “A palette of dusty greens, cognacs, and cranberries compliment a foundation of black and white and bluish grays. Layering in rich textures like wool, felt, and leather brings the color palette to life.”

During demolition, the Assembly design team encountered some unusual and unforeseen surprises. Preserved in the walls was almost a historic time capsule of sorts showcasing the building’s previous life — found department store boxes, tins, historic photographs, and World War I-era newspapers are all now displayed on gallery walls and on shelves throughout Assembly.

“One of the most exciting discoveries during demolition was a hidden room — the fur vault,” described Campfire. “Home of the original department store’s collection of valuable fur coats and accessories, the vault is now the inspiration for the large, shared boardroom on the same floor.”

A demolished gypsum wall also revealed an original mural on the previous exterior wall of the building, from when it was owned by Rice’s department store, which operated in the space from 1938 through the 1980s. The restored wall and mural now form one side of the new exit stairs.

WPA was able to find creative solutions to mechanical challenges that could have otherwise detracted from the workspace’s design, but not all surprises that crop up when renovating a historic building are as easy to embrace.

The built-in bar and benches on the top level, for instance, conceal mechanical duct work that the design team did not want exposed on the roof, which they were building out into a rooftop terrace and event space for the tenants. Yet, leaving the equipment exposed on the ceiling below the roof wasn’t a viable option either.

“We created a false wall at one side of the multi-purpose room in the penthouse and then ran the duct above the roof onto the terrace space. Concealed within the built-in bar and benches are duct lines supplying fresh air to the entire building,” explained WPA. “While the bar looks like an integral design criterion, its inclusion was driven by the need to conceal practical elements. The bar ends where the duct was able to travel vertically from the roof to the first floor.”

The design teams took careful consideration to create an overall building with its own embodied brand and a cohesive aesthetic to “create a style and experience that reflected the core values and personality of the building without having to rely on the brands of the tenants,” said Campfire, which meant “selecting colors, textures, and furniture that would be distinctive but not overpowering to the brands that decide to call this building home.”

While the building as a whole has a cohesive aesthetic and personality, “behind the tenant doors, there was a freedom to develop the space and palette,” said WPA, who experienced that concept firsthand when building out its own 4,500-square-foot suite in the building that primarily focused on merging places for multiple modes of work.

While the architecture firm successfully worked from home during the pandemic, its 16 employees were eager to get back to in-person collaboration once the construction on Assembly wrapped up.

“Design conversations, in our experience, are more successful when they are expressive and responsive... and filled with spontaneous diagramming and tangential thought,” said WPA. “Our entire team wants to be in the middle of a studio environment, but the trade-off of closeness is focus, and many of us need the ability for focused conversation or review.”

WPA had to figure out a way to give its employees both modes of working in one space. "In the design of the new studio, we wanted to provide options for taking phone calls away from our desks but still have all of our design work in front of us,” the firm said. “[In the studio] we have several singular and multi-person virtual solutions including a roving video conferencing station.”

Employees can have an informal conversation in the living room-like lounge, gather around standing worktables for a small meeting, or book a conference room for a meeting or a client visit when not at their individual desks, which are arranged in four-person “pods” in a line on the south side of the building.

There are also four reservable “day offices” in WPA’s studio for virtual calls that allow someone to “hold a meeting in varying levels of comfort: a traditional, glass-enclosed desked space we have cheekily dubbed the “Box Office,” an enclosed workstation with a sliding glass door, an informal lounge space for relaxed, laptop-driven meetings, and a phone booth for that quick pop-in conversation,” described the firm.

Critique is also critical to the design process, said WPA, so “pin-up space, monitors where we can cast work, and white boards for group conversations,” are all vital elements to WPA’s workplace productivity.

“Beyond that, anything that supports the design process, be it the resource gallery, the rooms for client and consultant conversations, the quiet spaces for contemplative study, or even the random encounters and associated conversations that happen on the short walk from Assembly’s front door to WPA’s studio, are the most special.”

The aforementioned resource gallery is an integral part of WPA’s design studio. Instead of housing material samples along the periphery of the office or hiding them in cabinets, WPA decided to embrace them in a space where they could be laid out on the large central island and showcased to clients or vendors.

“At the top of the resource gallery and down the 30-foot corridor to our workspaces, we have booked samples and our design library; complete with a library ladder, so we have ready access to everything we need to be inspired or make a selection,” said WPA, in addition to having storage drawers in the island and roving project totes on wheels to house samples of all sizes.

The idea further underscores the Assembly building’s ethos. “The resource gallery is located on the east side of the atrium and our conference room, and the project pin-up space is located on the west side of the atrium ... this allows everyone in the building to see the projects we are working on and how we work through the design process,” described WPA.

Within the larger Assembly building, the firm also regularly utilizes the variety of private spaces or phone booths available, a habit they formed while their suite was being built out.

“While the buildout of the WPA studio was not part of the core and shell construction of Assembly proper, being in the building, back together as a team [during the pandemic], was uplifting,” said WPA. “Now that we have a studio, we still find ourselves gravitating to those building-wide collaboration spaces... most often just for the opportunity to run into our colleagues and friends that also have a home in Assembly.”

The second phase of the Assembly project, set to begin construction in early 2023, will extend to the former Sears & Roebuck building next door and add another 53,000 square feet to the development.