Vanguard Group has leased 16,000 square feet at 2300
Chestnut St. for a Center City satellite office that it is calling an
“innovation center.”
The mutual fund company, which will maintain its vast
headquarters in Malvern, Pennsylvania, will occupy two floors at the building
and start out with 20 employees in the space.
Vanguard expects to eventually have 100 people working
from 2300 Chestnut and even have “external partners” co-locate in the building
with it. It expects to occupy the space during the second quarter.
Known as the Philadelphia Design Building, the
100,000-square-foot historic structure has been marketed by JLL as creative
office space. Among its tenants are Saxbys Coffee, which has its headquarters
in the building, Lauletta Birnbaum, a New Jersey law firm that has a satellite
office, as well as Running Press.
While it is in Center City, 2300 Chestnut’s location is
accessible to University City and educational institutions such as Drexel
University and the University of Pennsylvania, with which Vanguard plans to
work. It is also not far from 30th Street Station, and it keeps with a recent
trend of companies taking space in older buildings that have more character rather
than locating sleek office towers built in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Vanguard indicated last November
that it intended to open a Center City outpost, a first for the company. It
selected the building because it had the "right combination of location,
style of space and open floor plan and floor-to-ceiling windows," said Arianna Sherlock, a Vanguard spokeswoman.
"It will be different for us."
The company wanted to find something different from its
Malvern space and that was one of the drivers in looking downtown, Sherlock
said. It also wanted to secure an office that was dedicated to the innovation
team so that it could think and work and still be within proximity to the
company's home base but not involved with the every day routine of it.
Source: Philadelphia
Business Journal
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