Experience Principles

Design Inspired By School Spirit

Schools are special places. They are places where we learn and grow, where we connect and collaborate, where we are creative and competitive. These formative times create powerful, lasting memories that are brought back when we step into a school building. These emotional connections create a unique opportunity to design places and spaces that engage and inspire people.

Embracing our heritage as a historically-significant school, Garren will deliver a differentiated and distinctive office environment that will surround our tenants with a sense of school spirit – creating a one-of-a-kind office experience that will energize and excite their people and their culture.

Garren will stand out as a unique office environment by creating a compelling and cohesive campus feel that weaves together the historic school and gymnasium with an architecturally complementary mass timber building. The historic buildings will meet all the expectations for a modern office environment – the technology infrastructure, the collaboration spaces, etc. – while accentuating the fact that students once gathered here to learn.

Our approach will emphasize existing design elements that are most strongly connected to an educational environment while selectively injecting other elements of school homage in areas including a lobby that doubles as a collaborative workspace, community engagement spaces, signage, furniture and more. The new building will complement these historic school buildings, creating a feeling that bridges old and new. Overall, we will create a campus environment that is sophisticated, but not too serious – helping inspire the enthusiasm, optimism, and creativity we felt as students in the day-to-day lives of the people that will work here.

Connections Through Play

We believe that play, when leveraged correctly, is a powerful tool for business.

Garren will provide a unique platform for play that is inspired by the diverse ways that students used this same space decades ago. For these students, play happened on courts, stages, and art rooms, as individuals, small groups, and formal teams. We will deliver a unique and uniquely diverse set of community amenities to provide opportunities for all these types of play – places to shoot hoops or work up a sweat, places to pick at an instrument or take in a performance, places to hang upside down or simply sit on a swing are examples of purposeful, personality-rich amenities that can differentiate Garren in an authentic way.

We will also embrace a playful spirit throughout the campus in unique and creative ways in signage, art, and design that take their inspiration from the youthful energy and hope that is at the core of our story. We will use these playful elements to engage and inspire the users and visitors to our campus, helping share our history and progress where possible through the optimistic prism/lens of the students who are part of the legacy of the school.

Importantly, we will also use play as a driver of our engagement with the outside community through the reflection of history, art of recreation and honored athleticism. We will find opportunities to invite others to engage with us, bringing fresh energy and perspective into our community.

A Sense Of Renewal

Schools are uniquely dynamic and evolving places. Each new school year comes with a sense of optimism and excitement – a chance to learn new things, meet new people, reinvent yourself. This constant sense of renewal is inspiring and invigorating – something that is all too lacking in the monolithic boxes that dominate North Fulton County’s office-space offerings.

At Garren, we believe that office space can both be a familiar and comfortable home for a business and evolve over time. We will design flexible spaces that are built to be renewed regularly – creating dynamic “retail” experiences without any retail space, or an art-driven environment without any permanent exhibitions. This objective of “permanent evolution” will be central to our planning and programming for this community.

We will also leverage programming to bring a fresh, inspired perspective onto the campus on a consistent basis. A Ted-talk-style speaker series, hosting events for the Fulton County School District and the Alpharetta Arts Community each year (art show, business-case or debate competitions, etc.) or non-traditional fitness classes are the kinds of dynamic experiences that will infuse this community with the energy of “new” on a consistent basis. The history of learning, progress, and resilience will be an integral part of how we engage on and off campus with the broader community to further anchor our development in the legacy of progress.