Location, variety and nitro cold brew coffee are among some employees' favorite features of Tenable's new 150,000-square-foot offices in downtown Columbia, Maryland.
About three years after the cybersecurity firm announced plans to relocate its headquarters from a Columbia Gateway business park to a new 320,000-square-foot tower planned by developer Howard Hughes Corp., Tenable (NASDAQ: TENB) is breaking in its new digs. The company leased the top six floors of the recently erected 12-story tower at 6100 Merriweather Drive, becoming its anchor tenant. The move gave Tenable a blank slate and the chance to reimagine the kind of office environment it wanted to shape for its more than 500 locally based employees.
Steve Riddick, general counsel at Tenable, said the company's former offices were stationed in a kind of "amenities desert," with no workout facilities, restaurants or other places nearby where employees could go to unwind and socialize before or after work. It was important to the company that the new offices be stationed in an area where local employees could embrace a more "live, work, play" lifestyle, he said. And that is exactly the kind of environment Howard Hughes has aimed to build with its Merriweather District project.
Riddick said Tenable also wanted to move away from the kind of "cubicle farm" that is so common in corporate office spaces, and add more variety, flexibility and room for growth.
Tenable ultimately tapped Arium AE, a Columbia architecture firm, to take the lead on designing the new project. Brian Frels, a principal at Arium, said it was clear from the start that Tenable wanted its new space to be very unique, and designed to facilitate interaction and collaboration among its people.
Cindy McLaughlin, an architect at Arium, said she recalls writing down in an early meeting that the project should be “sophisticated with elements of quirk." The Arium team decided on the idea of constructing multiple working "villages" on each floor. Essentially, Arium applied different design elements to multiple spaces on each floor, from the lighting and ceilings to the flooring and the furniture, to give each space a different look and feel. And there were plenty of "elements of quirk” built-in, McLaughlin said, such as a wall with ping pong balls recessed into it, and turf flooring in a break room that has a backyard café theme.
Scroll through the gallery above to get a look at some of the different spaces inside Tenable's new HQ.
"There were 28 villages, which ended up being like 28 small, completely different projects. We pushed ourselves and our vendors to incorporate the maximum amount of variety," she said.
Madeline Mirecki, an architectural and interior design associate at Arium, said she hoped the villages concept would allow Tenable's employees to come into work and move around the space, and feel like they are getting a constant change of scenery. It could also be a more interesting, exciting space for the employees who work across the globe to visit from time to time.
Among the design team's favorite elements of the new space is a community stairway space, which connects two of the six floors and was designed as a space where people could gather and feel like they are sitting on a hillside under a tree, Mirecki said.
Riddick said employees' reactions to the new headquarters have been very positive so far. Some of the most talked-about elements, he said, include a nitro cold brew coffee station on one of the floors — some people are even lobbying to get a similar station on each floor — and an outdoor terrace that looks out over Merriweather Post Pavilion.
Other tenants of 6100 Merriweather Drive tower include Advarra, a firm that provides regulatory compliance consulting services to companies in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical-device industries, Insperity, a human resources and business solutions company, and Ames Watson, a private equity firm.
