A bartender begins lining up champagne flutes along a curved bar in what could be the lobby of a luxury hotel in preparation for a wedding or a major anniversary celebration. Instead, it's an in-office gathering.
CBRE celebrated in its revamped office in Uptown Dallas after an almost $25 million renovation of the two-floor, roughly 95,000-square-foot space that took about a year to complete. The workplace includes a speakeasy hidden behind bookcases and billiards room, the only office in the world's largest real estate services firm with those features.
The office at 2100 McKinney Ave. is the 75th U.S. location among CBRE's properties to be outfitted in its state-of-the-art design the company calls Workplace360, a program it started in 2013 with its Los Angeles office that was its headquarters at the time. The Dallas office is one of the firm's last locations to undergo this transformation, CBRE said.
The firm welcomed nearly 400 employees back to the Uptown Dallas office last week. The office's new hospitality-driven design is meant to lure top real estate talent and offer a place to advise clients, CBRE's regional leadership executives said during a recent tour. The hub is home to mostly brokers and other client-facing employees as well as those that work for Trammell Crow, CBRE's development arm.
Other companies with spaces that host clients are leaning into a hospitality-driven design. Global management consulting firm Bain & Co. recently expanded its Los Angeles office with a full floor for gathering space that includes a velvet-walled cocktail bar, a lounge lined with plant-covered walls and high-end lighting and art.
CBRE's new space includes a custom spiral staircase that was hauled in through one of the office's two terraces with the help of a massive crane. The winding interior staircase connects the seventh and eighth floors, providing more collaborative opportunities, executives said. Before the renovation, the firm's employees had to take the building's emergency stairwell or the elevator to get to other parts of the Dallas office.
The staircase leads up to the speakeasy, hidden behind moveable bookshelves on one side of the billiards room. The office also includes a putting green on the terrace on the seventh floor, 106 paintings or artwork, as well as curated bookshelves and colorful succulents meant to bring color to the space.
Ware Malcomb, which assumed CBRE's U.S. Design Collective employees in June, designed the new office. The designers say they were inspired by the luxury spaces of the premium hotels and private clubs populating Dallas.
'Moments of surprise'
Lindsay Wilson, president of Corgan, a Dallas-based architecture firm, said she wasn't surprised that CBRE wanted the design of its new Uptown Dallas office to be unique. Wilson wasn't involved in the project.
"Companies are wanting to do something unique, and they are looking for ways to have moments of surprise in their office in different ways and is part of a continued trend of giving a hospitality feel in our commercial and corporate office spaces," Wilson told CoStar News.
Corgan has recently added styling to its service offerings, giving clients the ability to adopt curated bookshelves, plants and handpicked art. The service has gained popularity as the flight-to-quality for office space has gained steam in recent years, Wilson said, and firms seek to upgrade their space to lure new clients or employees.
The speakeasy called The Cedar Room has been popular since it opened with Jeremy McGown, CBRE's Dallas-Fort Worth region market leader, noting collaborative and informal meetings already happening in the space.
"Jeremy just told me that he went up [to the speakeasy] the other day and found several members of our teams up there having a collaborative moment and just enjoying each other's company, and that makes me very happy," Brooke Armstrong, group president of the West Region for CBRE's U.S. advisory services business, said during the tour.
"It was a mix of new people who just started working here and people who had been here for a while, and it was a natural environment for this to happen," Armstrong added.
CBRE has had a presence at the McKinney Avenue office building owned by a retirement fund for the past 15 years, even before it moved its headquarters to Dallas from Los Angeles. CBRE relocated its corporate office from Los Angeles to Dallas in 2020, citing cost savings and wanting to shift its global hub to what was then already its largest office, as reported by CoStar News. In all, CBRE has 228 offices in the United States.
Almost moved elsewhere
Still, CBRE was considering moving out of the building and conducted a site selection process of the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area before deciding to stay, said McGown. The ease of coming and going from the Uptown Dallas office to other parts of North Texas is key for busy brokers to meet with clients and manage property tours, Armstrong added.
During construction, CBRE employees were scattered at other Dallas-area offices, including its neighboring global headquarters along Pearl Street, as well as its suburban office in Richardson, Texas, about 15 miles north of Uptown Dallas. The redo of the McKinney Avenue office comes a year after CBRE revamped its global headquarters from a former coworking space spanning three floors at PwC Tower overlooking Klyde Warren Park.
The 2100 McKinney Ave. office is about a half-block from its headquarters, giving the global leadership team the ability to quickly visit either Dallas office.
CBRE is eligible to receive $3.4 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund in exchange for creating 460 jobs and investing more than $29 million in North Texas by 2034 as part of a grant the governor announced in 2021, as reported by CoStar News. CBRE was the first real estate firm to receive a grant from the state's deal-closing fund.
There's a chef-served dining area for employees on the seventh floor off the lobby. Executives are able to sit down and dine with colleagues or take a quick grab-and-go breakfast or lunch on the run. There's also a CBRE Dallas Experience Center with a 40-foot LED wall and an interactive table.
The office has so-called neighborhoods to help teams better collaborate, McGown said. Portions of the office include huddle rooms for teams and a variety of conference rooms.