Wal-Mart home office is now a bikeable extention of Bentonville

Walmart is building a new headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, its hometown. The campus is a whopping 350 acres and will blend seamlessly into the city’s downtown.

The new headquarters, called the Home Office, has over a dozen buildings and can house over 15,000 Walmart employees in Bentonville, a city of about 55,000. It includes office buildings, a central gathering hall, an amphitheater, a huge health and fitness center, a massive “layout center” where store ideas can be tested, and a daycare for up to 500 kids. Half of the site is landscaped like a public park with open space, bike and walking trails, streams, and 13 acres of constructed lakes. And guess what? Unlike other corporate campuses of this size, there’s no gate or walls around the site.

“Bentonville has always been our home, and it will always be,” says Raven Washabaugh, Walmart’s senior manager for global communications. “We think of this 350-acre campus as an extension of downtown Bentonville.”

The new campus officially opened on Friday, but it’s still under construction. Walmart expects all the buildings to be finished and ready to be used by the end of the year. This also happens to coincide with Walmart’s controversial announcement in 2024 that many of its remote workers would have to move to Bentonville or one of its offices in San Francisco or New York to keep their jobs.

Back in 2017, Walmart had an idea for a new campus. It was way before the pandemic made remote work so popular. In 2019, the design team got started. They worked with Sasaki, a big urban design firm, and Gensler, the main architect, and SWA, the landscape architect. They wanted to turn Walmart’s scattered office buildings into a central hub that would attract and keep good people, and also give back to the city.

“When we looked at the site six years ago, it was just a bunch of huge parking lots, boxy buildings with no windows, and some landscaping. It was pretty much something you’d drive by and not even notice,” says Gerdo Aquino, co-CEO of SWA. “It was pretty much nothing special.”

The designers wanted to make Walmart’s new campus a place people would want to go, both for work and for the people who live in Bentonville.

“We wanted to create a sense of connection across the campus for their employees, and a connection to the community,” says Raffael Scasserra, principal and design director at Gensler. “Connection was the driving force behind everything we did.”
The campus design is perfectly integrated with the city’s existing street grid, featuring Walmart office buildings, public spaces, and restaurants. The layout of buildings and open spaces includes plazas, quads, and winding pathways, encouraging collaboration among the thousands of employees. Aquino explains that the different journeys, ranging from five to fifteen minutes, are connected by these open spaces. Walmart was instrumental in designing these outdoor areas, ensuring that the landscape’s value is directly linked to their activities.

Inspired by the Ozark Mountains, the campus features lakes and streams to manage the region’s rainfall and irrigate the 150 acres of native and adapted landscape, including 5,000 trees. Aquino emphasizes the significance of water as a defining feature of the campus. However, there’s a concern that outdoor activities, like boating, might not be strictly followed due to the region’s popularity for such activities. Aquino acknowledges that some employees and locals might be tempted to break the rules, especially if they witness the first fishermen on the water.

Aquino explains that the layout is basically the same as it was before. They made all the visible features of the landscape and used them as a starting point for everything they’ve done since. They placed open spaces around buildings, decided on certain street orientations, and planted communities based on the terrain, like high and low areas, wet and dry spots.

Most of the buildings were designed by Gensler using mass timber. They did this for two reasons: to reduce the carbon footprint of building with wood and to make it easier to build off-site and use the materials for multiple buildings at once.

The buildings were designed to fit in with the existing character of the city. Scasserra says Gensler studied the region’s architecture and used it as inspiration for the exterior designs, including the window types and brick facades, as well as the common four- or five-story heights.

Inside, the office buildings have a similar layout. Despite their large floor plans, they’re designed to encourage collaboration and focus, which are important in today’s workplace. Each building has a large central staircase that leads to gathering areas in the center of the building. The open space at the top of the stairs encourages people to interact and walk between floors, and the central hub becomes a gathering place for starting and ending the day, as well as for socializing with colleagues. The workplace is placed in the open areas around the perimeter of the building.
Walmart thinks about half of its Home Office folks live within five miles of the new campus. They’ve got a goal of having 10% of their workforce bike to work. Aquino says they’ve got shaded “bicycle gardens” and bike parking areas in front of every big building on campus. They’ve also got almost seven miles of bike paths, shared-use paths, and streets all over the place. In total, the campus has over 1,000 bike parking spaces. With all the trails, paths, and connections to the city, it’s likely that there’ll be way more than just employees biking through Walmart’s new campus. “It’s a whole new way of thinking about having a bike trail and a park right in the middle of your campus,” Scasserra says. “The public is totally integrated into this campus.”