Business

Hot property: 4900 Olson Hwy., Golden Valley

For the Minnesota Star Tribune

August 16, 2013 at 1:26PM

Room & Board Furniture (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

4900 Olson Hwy., Golden Valley

Type: Showroom/Office

Campus size: 12.9 acres

Developer: Room & Board

Architect: Fortier Architects

Details: Room & Board Furniture is seeking to rearrange its corporate campus in Golden Valley to allow more parking for its popular weekend outlet store sales and to add office space for its growing workforce.

Room & Board, which specializes in high-end handcrafted, American-made modern furniture, is seeking to modify the planned unit development designation it has had for its campus since 1998.

It currently opens its 19,000-square-foot outlet store on Saturday and Sunday mornings — events that regularly fill its main parking lot of 140 spaces. Under preliminary concept plans approved by the Golden Valley Planning Commission Monday, it would demolish the current outlet store building to add more parking, raising capacity of the main parking lot to 284 spaces, while the store would be relocated to an existing warehouse elsewhere on the 12.9-acre site.

Meanwhile, a 46,000-square-foot intermediate office level would be created within the 12-year-old warehouse to provide office space for the furniture company's expanding workforce.

Room & Board says 235 people now work at the campus, up from 200 in 2010, and growth is expected to continue. The new office space would accommodate the possible addition of 168 employees, with about 25,000 square feet of the space to be built out beginning this year, enough for 85 new office workers.

Don Jacobson is a freelance writer in St. Paul. He can be reached at hotproperty.startribune@gmail.com.