While the pandemic prompted Pacific Life Insurance Co. to vacate its Aliso Viejo office tower—and subsequently list it for sale—the provider of life and retirement insurance is still investing in its physical workspace, recently wrapping an extensive upgrade of its Newport Beach headquarters.
The 350,000-square-foot landmark office is now the home base for 1,700 employees in a post-pandemic design that aims to support various work strategies, from fully remote to working five days in the office.
Newport Beach-based design firm H. Hendy Associates was behind the design of the new office, which Principal Anna Alm-Grayhek said is “a complete glow-up from its previous incarnation.”
“Employers are trying to determine what hybrid looks like in the office,” Alm-Grayhek told the Business Journal. “They know they can work remotely but how do they maintain culture and keep communication high?”
The result for PacLife was a reimagined space with more collaboration spaces and break rooms, natural lighting and a blend of shared desks and private offices to suit the company’s diverse workplace needs.
It’s part of a forward-thinking strategy for the company as it caters to the preferences of both younger employees and tenured folks, and looks to maintain the hybrid-workforce model in the years to come.
“We believe there is value to having employees in the office for collaboration and the benefits that come from working in teams, but there’s also value in providing flexibility for employees,” Tennyson Oyler, senior vice president of brand management and corporate affairs at PacLife, said, adding the company doesn’t foresee heading back to the office full time.
Growing Needs
Prior to the pandemic, PacLife saw the need to upgrade its Newport Beach facility, which was first built in the 1970s.
“We knew we needed to update the property to fit our growing needs, and we started a design plan that would take about five years to complete, if we were to remain operational during the renovation,” Oyler said. “Then, the pandemic hit, which we used to do the full renovation at once.”
The pandemic prompted PacLife to rethink its space needs, a strategy furthered by the appointment of Darryl Button as CEO in 2022, who wanted to rethink the company’s non-core assets.
After the pandemic left PacLife’s Aliso Viejo office vacant, the company decided to list the 250,000-square-foot asset, eyeing a price tag topping $80 million for the office tower at 45 Enterprise that was built in 2008 for the company.
In addition to that listing, the company last month sold off Rancho Santa Margarita’s Tijeras Creek Golf Club for nearly $25 million, part of a larger portfolio of golf courses it had owned.
“We’re focused on being a life insurance company,” Button told the Business Journal in June.
Now, all of PacLife’s 1,700 OC employees are based out of the Newport Beach office. The employer’s strategy to rethink its space usage gave a bit of a head start to Hendy when it signed on to the project.
“When we have a client with such a strong vision, it’s a huge advantage for a design firm,” Alm-Grayhek said.
Visualizing the Future
PacLife had surveyed each individual department and provided Hendy with data points on the number and frequency of employees working from the office; the design firm then used data visualization tool Tableau to come up with various configurations of desks, offices and square footage usage for the hybrid workforce.
In addition to modernizing the office for remote working trends, PacLife wanted to modernize the office from an energy usage standpoint and bring it up to today’s code while adding natural design elements.
“We brought it into today’s standard for a modern office by letting in more natural lighting, increasing accessibility, downsizing the number of private offices along the perimeter of the building and increasing the number of engagement zones, or break areas,” Alm-Grayhek said, including more outdoor access.
“We learned during COVID-19 that employees want diversity in their workplace stations and to utilize different spaces in different capacities.”
PacLife also updated the building’s windows, retrofitting them to current earthquake codes.
Hendy’s 5.11 Retrofit
Though many companies have downsized their office operations in the wake of the pandemic, not everyone is doing more with less.
Newport Beach-based design firm H. Hendy Associates was behind the overhaul of the new headquarters for 5.11 Tactical, which signed a lease for a 39,650-square-foot office at the Canvas office campus in Costa Mesa, an expansion from its prior base in Irvine.
Irvine-based Ram Construction LLC was the tenant-improvement contractor on the project.
The recently wrapped renovation converted the traditional office space into a “wholly immersive brand experience” with corridors dotted with mannequins outfitted in the company’s latest products and retail displays. Such products—from backpacks to clothing—are woven into ceiling and lighting elements, joining wood, steel and cinder block materials to give a rugged and industrial feel.
A pixelated world map is displayed in the elevator lobby with the brand’s target icon marking office and retail locations globally; the icons are magnetic, allowing for flexibility to add more locations as the company expands.
A large faux granite boulder serves as the reception centerpiece and blends into the reception desk, while a canyon-themed corridor runs throughout the office.
“With our new headquarters, we challenged Hendy to design a cultural destination that embodies 5.11 Tactical’s distinct spirit and unites our team under one roof both physically and emotionally around our shared mission to “‘Always Be Ready,’” 5.11 Tactical CEO Francisco Morales said.
“The final environment is everything we imagined and more.”
Other local clients for Hendy include Bandai Namco—with Hendy heading the redesign of its new Irvine headquarters—Kawasaki and Behr Paint Co.
