It doesn't take long to be wowed by Argodesign's new headquarters just off South Congress Avenue.
If the building and its modern design don't catch your eye, then the nearly pristine 1965 Shelby Cobra on the main level will probably do the trick. The car, which was assembled by the Argodesign team, is a bit of a side project intended to take employees out of the digital realm they typically work in.
"There's nothing like riveting two pieces of metal together to really understand what interoperability is or what planning is, or that making a change doesn't have impacts down the line," said founder and Chief Creative Officer Mark Rolston. "And so it's really cool to bring everyone together on a physical project, spend a couple years building something like that."
But there's plenty more in the new space to explore.
Office Envy: Inside Argodesign's new HQ
Argodesign's new HQ, which sits behind Hotel San Jose off Gibson Street, is a redesign of a former church that had been empty for around a decade. Now it has taken on a new life as home to a digital and physical product development team known for a wide-ranging portfolio of work spanning from a work lab to develop applications for Magic Leap's augmented reality platform to AI interfaces, managing assets for DreamWorks and a pour-over coffee maker.
And it has something that is increasingly rare, especially near downtown: a surface parking lot, which comes thanks to the church zoning the property had carried. That's a bonus for the company's roughly 60 local employees.
Inside, the natural woods, light and soft tones across all three levels evoke a sense of purposeful calm. Workspaces are laid out in a flexible design, with one area largely dedicated to team meetings and preparing presentations by project-based teams, as well as a lower level with large classrooms that can be rented out for design instruction or other courses.
"These designers, you can see, they spend all day working on aesthetics," said Jared Ficklin, a founding partner and chief creative technologist at the firm. "They're staring at digital screens with like 60 hertz refresh rate. They're obsessing over colors and pixels. And when they pull back and look up, we want them to have a natural grounding space. So we use a lot of mute tones and and kind of natural materials."
The main level features a large kitchen space with community gathering areas, an outdoor patio and a maker space with specialized ventilation for 3D printing and other physical design and prototyping projects.
The new HQ is just the latest chapter for Argodesign, which was founded in 2014 and was acquired in 2018 by DXC Technology. It has nearly 100 employees at offices in Austin, New York and Amsterdam. The company generates around $35 million in annual revenue.
Rolston said the company's growth has been relatively steady through the years.
"We're not trying to engineer the growth," he said. "There is interest in axiom and a lot of businesses, especially ones driven by personality, where you're either growing or you're dying. We'd rather be on the growing side of that. But we're not trying to force some insane market story. We're just trying to grow in response to customers coming to us. And that is largely driven by people. You can acquire people, kind of take them in and make them part of the system, at only a certain rate."
