When the lease on their office space expired, Minneapolis-based engineering firm Loucks sought out a team that could help create their ideal work environment in a new location. With help from BWBR, furniture dealership Henricksen, real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, and some extraordinary luck, Loucks transformed an already promising space into a workplace that supports their culture, enhances well-being, and aligns with today’s technology needs—all while keeping existing furniture out of landfills.
Finding the Perfect Fit
Like countless firms dusting off from the pandemic years, Loucks faced a dated office ill-suited for modern hybrid work. “Our existing space was pretty dated and didn’t really serve our needs for how we worked after the COVID period,” said Jon Donovan, Principal Civil Engineer at Loucks. “Our space at the old building didn’t have the breakout rooms, the focus rooms, conference rooms.”
The team at Loucks worked with Cushman & Wakefield to discover a space so well-aligned with their needs that it felt predestined. Nate Ekhoff, Principal and Director of Landscape Architecture at Loucks, found that “the office space at Jet 55 was really nice because it had been recently renovated.” Even the existing furniture color scheme matched their brand.
Kelly Heatley, Senior Architect at BWBR, says this great match allowed them to reshuffle their priorities. “One of the benefits was it was fairly well set up for how you work. You had workstations in place. There were already conference areas, private offices. A lot of the focus got to be on creating the spaces where you come together.” In other words, “the fun spaces.”
Smart Design, Smart Spending
Instead of viewing the pre-existing elements as constraints, the team recognized them as liberating forces. “There is a lot more push to try to reuse furniture because it can be expensive, so if you can reuse furniture, it often allows you to free up resources for other areas,” Kelly says.
And this project achieved exactly that: “From a furniture perspective, we probably reused 90% of the products that were in there,” says Ikaria Chorley, A&D Market Manager at Henricksen.
With reuse saving significant dollars, the design team put budget toward spaces that help Loucks’ culture thrive. They transformed a workplace with one conference room into one with three well-appointed gathering spaces—plus focus rooms, collaboration zones, fun games like darts and ping pong, and a work café with a farmhouse-style table, flexible seating, and tech hookups for impromptu meetings.
The new café became so inviting that employees use it beyond working hours. “We’ve had people use it for personal gatherings too, like Thanksgiving, Christmas,” Jon says. “It’s nice that they want to come to the office after the workday ends.”
The Earth Wins, Too
While Loucks created their ideal space, the planet also benefitted from sustainable solutions. Ikaria highlights a critical fact: when office furniture gets discarded, it typically sits in landfills for decades. The manufacturing partners involved are also stepping up their game. “I’m really proud of the initiatives Allsteel is putting in place for sustainability,” Ikaria says. “By 2025, they are going to be moving to 100% recyclable packaging.”
And in a nod to Minnesota’s forward-thinking regulations on PFAS (those “forever chemicals” linked to various health concerns and environmental impacts), Allsteel has already eliminated these substances from their products.
Space that Reflects Values
Beyond being a match for their sustainability goals and existing branding, the space reflects Loucks’ cultural values: “It’s great to give your employees choice. Especially after COVID, not everyone sits at a desk and works anymore, so that tech table that we have by the window, someone could go there and take a 30-minute call if they needed, or go and do some heads-down work there,” Ikaria says.
“From a recruiting standpoint, that was definitely one of the things we wanted for our project, and it’s nice having a space to be proud of to invite people in, you know, clients and potential employees,” Nate says. The results speak for themselves: “We’ve certainly been adding people since we’ve moved in.”
Collaboration is Everything
For Jon, who doesn’t typically find himself on the client side of design projects, the experience proved remarkably smooth. “We don’t deal with a lot of the tenant improvement stuff. BWBR, Henricksen’s team, and Steiner, who did our general contracting, made it so easy for us from start to finish.”
This smoothness came despite what could have been a recipe for chaos. “We have four or five, six people in our office making the decisions,” Jon said. “You had a lot of cooks in the kitchen and the spaces tweak and pull and push.”
Yet with collaboration and a shared vision, Loucks’ new office supports their culture and staff needs into the future—and makes a fantastic case for the powerful impact of reuse.
