Office space in the ’80s-era Leadership Square is getting a makeover by Enogex, an OGE Energy subsidiary.
BY RICHARD MIZE
Enogex LLC’s new headquarters in Oklahoma City’s Leadership Square will be a 130,000-square-foot snapshot of corporate cultural change in the energy business since the last energy boom.
Big, richly appointed corner offices with the best views and best light? Gone.
Second-tier executives in second-tier but still-envied offices along the perimeter of the building? Gone. Rank-and-file office workers grouped in the middle of each floor far from the windows? Gone.
That whole arrangement, and the traditional attitude it represents, will be rearranged by the time Enogex moves in at 211 N Robinson Ave. next year. The Enogex space, after being torn to the studs and rebuilt for the second time in five years, will be all about Enogex corporate culture, not the old-school oil-and-gas business.
Status check
Status within the business is out as a driving force for how space is arranged, said Keith Mitchell, president of Enogex, a natural gas pipeline subsidiary of OGE Energy Corp.
After some $7 million in renovations, Enogex will occupy all of floors three through eight and one-half of nine in Leadership Square’s 22-story north tower. That will make it Leadership Square’s biggest tenant, with 15 percent of its space, said Mark Beffort, co-owner with Roy Oliver and others.
The new front-office space is being designed with function and efficiency first in mind, with lots of glass and open space and most work areas toward the windows and natural light, said Richard Van Voast of Grubb & Ellis-Levy Beffort, building manager.
“It’s our culture and the kind of people we are,” Mitchell said this week while seeing the work in progress for the first time. “We have about 400 people we’re looking to grow into — we’re looking for some good space for our folks. We’re trying to recruit new members and to grow.”
Return to downtown
About 360 Enogex employees will make the move. The company will be leaving space it leases in Central Park Two, 515 Central Park Drive, where it moved from downtown 25 years ago. Over time, the company leased more and more space until it occupied almost all of the 125,217-square-foot building southwest of Interstate 44 and Lincoln Boulevard. It has long outgrown the place, Mitchell said.
Enogex left downtown as it was imploding during the mid-1980s oil bust. Mitchell said the company is glad to be returning as part of downtown’s renaissance.
“We wanted to be part of the downtown community. OGE is here, as well as several of our customers. That continues to grow. Our customers are growing down here,” Mitchell said.
But first, the remodel.
Boom to boom
Leadership Square itself is a 790,000-square-foot monument to the 1980s oil boom and city growth. Its two towers will take second chair in the energy office orchestra that always plays in downtown Oklahoma City after Devon Energy Corp.’s $500 million, 50-story tower is finished at 333 W Sheridan. Both glass-encased skyscrapers will shine, just in different ways.
Devon Energy Center, while vast at 1.8 million square feet, is an owner-occupied building, built to suit one company: Devon Energy. Leadership Square, built in 1982-84, has always been a multi-tenant office complex catering to the office space needs of businesses in or out of the energy business.
It’s not unusual to see large amounts of space renovated in Leadership Square. Tenants requiring more than a few thousand square feet usually use an allowance negotiated as part of a lease to upgrade their new digs or otherwise renovate space to meet their own needs and company culture.
Usually, they have to because of lack of big-space options on the market, said Craig Tucker, an office broker with Price Edwards & Co. Small office users can usually find space that works for them with just a few changes, he said.
The Enogex work is not the most complicated renovation ever at Leadership Square.
McAfee & Taft, Oklahoma’s largest law firm, occupies about 100,000 square feet in the 16-story south tower, where it has been located since 1985. Price Edwards renovated that space once in 16 phases, temporarily relocating departments as McAfee & Taft continued to do business, said Ford Price, managing partner of the realty firm.
Traces of Kerr-McGee
What’s interesting about the new Enogex space, from an Oklahoma City energy business perspective, is the company that had it last: Tronox Inc., which originated as a subsidiary of Kerr-McGee Corp., a fixture in the oil-and-gas business from its founding in 1929 to its acquisition by Anadarko Petroleum, based in The Woodlands, Texas, in 2006.
Kerr-McGee spun off Tronox, its chemical unit, just months before being absorbed by Anadarko Petroleum. Tronox grew fast, leasing most of the now-future Enogex space. “They knocked it down and started over,” said Tucker, who negotiated the lease for Tronox.
Tucker said the five floors were redesigned and reoriented to reflect the thinking that Tronox had inherited from Kerr-McGee. The redesign did not result in the most efficient use of the space, Tucker said, but it was what Tronox wanted.
“They came out of the old Kerr-McGee culture,” he said. “They all had to have their 14-by-14-foot private offices with room for (traditional midcentury-styled) furniture.”
Tronox went into bankruptcy in January 2009 and came out last Feb. 14. In the meantime, the space it leased in Leadership Square went back on the market.
On July 1, Enogex reported it had leased the space and then some and set about its plans for making it its own, with Kansas City-based Burns & McDonnell Engineering brought on to do the job.
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