Reimagining a 30-Year-Old Headquarters for Growth, Flexibility, and Connection
Consumer Goods
Sector
El Segundo, CA
Location
Central Challenge:
After more than 30 years in the same headquarters, a legacy toy company recognized an opportunity to reimagine its 15-story El Segundo campus for a new era of work. The workplace no longer reflected evolving employee expectations, hybrid work patterns, or the company's future growth plans. Leadership sought to create an environment that would encourage employees to return to the office, support greater flexibility, and improve collaboration across business units while minimizing disruption to day-to-day operations.
At the same time, the tower needed to accommodate increased capacity and establish stronger adjacencies between departments. The challenge was not simply to renovate a workplace, but to create a long-term strategy that aligned the physical environment with the client's culture, business objectives, and future workforce needs.
Our Approach:
Over a four-month engagement, Ark and HLW worked in tandem to develop a workplace framework that balanced employee experience, operational requirements, and long-term growth. Through visioning sessions, stakeholder interviews, spatial analysis, and future workforce projections, the team evaluated how the headquarters could better support collaboration, flexibility, and organizational performance.
By combining workplace strategy with real-time design studies, this client was able to evaluate multiple planning scenarios while building alignment around a shared vision for the future workplace.
Planning for Growth
Ark conducted a comprehensive diagnostic, analyzing occupancy data, growth projections, adjacency requirements, and lease exposure. Multiple scenarios were developed and stress-tested against hybrid attendance assumptions, financial implications, and operational complexity.
Rather than advancing a single solution, we developed and stress-tested multiple long-range scenarios. Each was evaluated against defined decision criteria:
Capital efficiency
Flexibility under hybrid variability
Growth capacity
Operational complexity
Risk exposure
This approach transformed uncertainty into structured decision intelligence, enabling leadership to compare tradeoffs with precision.
Tactics:
Over a four-month strategy and design process, Ark worked closely with stakeholders to align the tower with evolving business drivers. Department interviews and headcount projections informed detailed stacking scenario studies, validating relocation strategies and testing preferred adjacencies.
Portfolio Complexity
The Tower's revitalization was considered one of many moving parts across the campus over a 5-year phased approach. A key component of the engagement was the comprehensive restacking of the client’s 15-story headquarters.
We synthesised all of these findings to establish guiding concepts for the design team to bring the space to life.
The Strategic Outcome
The selected strategy establishes a phased, multi-decade roadmap that rationalizes four buildings into a more efficient long-term footprint of approximately 700,000 square feet.
The result:
Improved space utilization aligned to hybrid behavior
Reduced portfolio fragmentation and long-term exposure
Clear capital planning across a 20-year horizon
A scalable framework for future growth
The headquarters is now positioned as a dynamic platform — capable of evolving alongside the business.
A key component of the engagement was the comprehensive restacking of the client’s 15-story headquarters. Using departmental interviews, operational requirements, and future headcount projections, the team developed and evaluated multiple stacking scenarios to determine how teams could be organized more effectively across the tower.
While the client initially hoped to minimize department relocations, the analysis demonstrated that strategic moves would create stronger adjacencies, improve collaboration, and provide greater flexibility for future growth. The preferred solution established a more cohesive workplace ecosystem while creating opportunities to increase workstation capacity, expand collaboration spaces, and introduce interchangeable offices and huddle rooms that could adapt over time.
The resulting program balanced immediate business needs with long-term flexibility, creating a workplace framework capable of evolving alongside the organization.
Enabling Adoption
Ark supported implementation through executive alignment workshops and a tailored change management guide, ensuring the strategy translated into operational and cultural adoption.
Ark’s scope includes SteerCo and Change Champion engagements along with Town Halls for each of the three buildings undergoing renovations or relocations across the campus.
