Data Company’s New HQ Will Be Among OC’s Most Modern
When Experian Inc.’s new Costa Mesa headquarters is finished this year, the credit-rating and business consulting company will lay claim to one of the most modern corporate campuses in Orange County.
Experian, a unit of Britain’s Great Universal Stores PLC, has twice outgrown its current headquarters in Orange.
In September, the company broke ground on a new 19.2-acre campus near the San Diego (I-405) and Costa Mesa (55) freeways on Anton Boulevard. Experian is looking to transform a bean field near South Coast Plaza into a showcase for employees and clients.
“We are one of Orange County’s largest employers and needed a facility that would accommodate our projected growth,” said Ken Krueger, Experian’s vice president of facilities and procurement.
Plans for the campus call for four buildings with 375,00 square feet of office space. A 15,000-square-foot conference and training center also is in the works, as is a 6,000-square-foot commissary. The site will include a parking structure and landscaped areas with streams.
“Our North American operations have increased significantly over the past two years,” said John Peace, group chief executive of Great Universal Stores. “We have expanded our existing facilities in Orange twice already but have continually outgrown the space.”
Experian’s 1,200 OC employees now are in four buildings in Orange. In Costa Mesa, they’ll have proximity to restaurants, a coffeehouse and a fitness club that are being built in the nearby South Coast Metro Center.
Experian officials said they were looking for visibility and accessibility in their new headquarters. Scott Johnson, lead architect and design partner with Los Angeles-based Johnson Fain Partners, said his firm started work on the project by sketching out a theoretical campus, and then adapting it to the Costa Mesa location.
Security was a concernfor Experian, Johnson said, not only for people walking to and from their cars, but also in terms of keeping private the data Experian collects.
One way the architects addressed Experian’s privacy concerns is by having the four campus buildings arranged around a courtyard, with a secure wall encircling the entire site. As a result, Experian employees will be able to move from one building to another without ever leaving the secure campus.
Experian maintains credit information on some 205 million consumers and 14 million businesses in the U.S., and demographic information on more than 98% of U.S. households. To keep things humming, the site will include an advanced back-up power system, Johnson said.
Inside the buildings, there will be a high proportion of workstations with a lot of natural light, as opposed to private, enclosed offices, Johnson said.
Experian is “very state-of-the-art technologically,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a highly informal working style. While people work in open office spaces, there’s a large proportion of teaming and common shared space.”
With a tight labor market, Experian wanted to make the campus an attractive place for employees, Johnson said.
Bright, light colors, glass and plenty of natural light will bring the outdoors inside, he said.
“There’s a level of possibility in California to blur the distinction between outside and inside that we wouldn’t have if we were in New Jersey or in Pennsylvania,” Johnson said.
A glass-enclosed lobby and elevators on the outside of the buildings add to the design theme, he said.
Johnson said he foresees the possibility of business meetings being conducted in the courtyard and other areas. With employees spending more hours on the job, there is a need for informality and variety within a project, he said. The Experian campus will have shaded arcades connecting the buildings, while the commissary will overlook the gardens. The central quad will include planted landscaping and a stream.
Johnson Fain Partners has designed some landmark Southern California buildings, including Fox Plaza, which was featured in the movie “Die Hard.” The firm also has done work at the University of California, Irvine.
Swinerton & Walberg is the construction company on the Experian project, with Staubach Co. as the construction manager. Experian expects to start moving employees to the new site later this year and complete its relocation in the second quarter of 2002. n
