Holly Dutton of Propmodo

Walmart has bold plans for its new headquarters. The company, which has been the world’s largest retailer since 1990, has long been headquartered in Arkansas. The company’s first store opened in the state in 1962, and the small town of Bentonville became the company’s headquarters in 1970. But the company’s new campus, rising just a couple miles from its original HQ, represents a major step forward. It comes several months after the leaders announced a $9 billion plan to renovate and modernize more than 1,400 of its stores nationwide. Envisioned as a campus of the future, Walmart hopes that the innovative layout and long list of features will raise the bar for what a corporate headquarters can look like. After first announcing its plans to move in 2017, the vision for the new campus began to truly take shape two years later when the company unveiled details about the new home office. Reportedly inspired by Microsoft’s forward-looking Seattle headquarters as well as Pepsi and Chick-fil-A’s HQs in Atlanta, Walmart looked to expand significantly outside of just office space with its new complex. Taking up more than 350 acres, the sprawling HQ, built to house around 15,000 workers, is almost a village unto itself.

For the amenities at the new HQ, the company partnered with leading childcare provider Bright Horizons to integrate a childcare center that can accommodate more than 500 children. According to the company, having onsite childcare was the number one request from Walmart employees when asked what they wanted most at the new campus. It’s not surprising—childcare has gotten a renewed focus since Covid, as the health crisis underscored the lack of options and high costs parents face when looking for facilities. The push to bring workers back to the office has led many office landlords to explore adding childcare centers to their properties. The 73,000-square-foot center will serve children from infancy through pre-K. The center is so big it is anticipated to be the largest childcare center in Northwest Arkansas.

Other standout amenities include a rooftop bar, a fitness center for employees, pickle ball courts, and hot yoga classes. A centralized building on the campus will have an auditorium, conference center, and numerous flex, meeting, and classroom spaces. The building, Sam Walton Hall, will have more than 200,000 square feet of space and will be used for training, career development programming, town hall meetings, and other kinds of events.

Walmart’s new HQ will also have a 10-mile network of hike and bike paths that carve their way through the campus. Adding the paths is certainly a nod to the health and wellness trend that has ramped up in recent years in the office sector, but it also caters to local desires: the town of Bentonville is known as a magnet for mountain biking.

The office space component of the campus will be spread across 12 office buildings, each in different “neighborhoods” and surrounded by trees and native vegetation. Although all of the buildings will be designed differently, they will all be built using sustainable materials, including regionally sourced mass timber and dynamic glass. Office layouts will be designed to accommodate a variety of different work styles, with spaces for collaboration, eating, and meeting, private workspace and hot desks, soundproof phone booths, and softly lit focus rooms. Employees (or associates, as Walmart refers to its workers) have the ability to reserve whichever workspace or meeting space they need, as well as what the company calls “innovation studios” and full-service tech bars.

In addition to the use of sustainable materials in constructing office buildings, there will also be a number of other green features at Walmart’s new HQ. On the south side of the spacious campus, a lake is connected to the complex’s irrigation system and collects storm water, which cuts the need for Wal-Mart’s headquarters to depend on the city’s water supply. The campus has ten parking garages that have space for more than 12,000 vehicles, including 274 EV charging stations, according to Core slab Structures, which was part of the team behind the parking structures.

Over the years, Walmart’s presence has certainly helped grow the small town of Bentonville. The once-sleepy town has boomed over the last decade, fueled by the retail giant’s growth as it continues to compete with Amazon for the largest retailer crown. The new campus, which is open to the public, will certainly help further bolster growth in Bentonville, but the impetus for building a world-class office campus came straight from a bid to recruit and retain talent, according to company leaders. “Hands down, this is a recruitment and retention play which will pull more of the talent of tomorrow to come to Northwest Arkansas,” said Cindi Marsiglio, Walmart’s senior vice president of corporate real estate.

Walmart’s dominance as the world’s largest retailer has been long-running and doesn’t appear to change anytime soon. But company leaders understand that evolving and rebranding is necessary to retain an edge in today’s competitive retail environment, especially with e-commerce giant Amazon hot on the company’s heels. Walmart’s new campus represents yet another example of a major brand stretching the idea of what an office campus can be. And like those other examples, Walmart’s headquarters serves several purposes at once: first and foremost, as an office for corporate employees, but also as an advertisement for its brand, a tool for recruitment and retention, and what the future of the office could look like. In this case, it’s a small town or village, a smart move considering the popularity of mixed-use, walkable developments.