The country’s largest apartment manager has a new home on Charleston’s upper peninsula.
Greystar Real Estate Partners and the building’s design team announced today the completion of the Greystar Building, the company’s new headquarters on Meeting Street. The five-story building has 82,000 square feet: 70,000 square feet of offices and 12,000 square feet of retail space.
The building completes the first phase of Evening Post Industries’ Courier Square redevelopment, according to Greystar. It is the second building to open in that phase. The first was The Guild, a Greystar-owned and -managed apartment building that opened in the spring of 2018.
Greystar’s securities filings list its address as 465 Meeting St. The company had been based at 18 Broad St., according to earlier filings.
“Greystar is a Charleston-bred company, so we were highly sensitive to the fact that our new headquarters needed to blend seamlessly into its exterior environment while providing the interior scale and infrastructure needed to support our rapidly growing team,” said Bob Faith, Greystar’s chairman and CEO.
A classical outside
Robert A.M. Stern Architects, known as RAMSA, designed the exterior, as it did for The Guild. Greystar said the firm took cues from Charleston’s 19th-century classical architecture and added Greek Revival details.
To keep a large office building in scale with its neighbors, the architects made the exterior look like several smaller buildings, according to the company. LS3P was the master planner and architect of record.
“Where we designed the Guild to reflect the neighborhood’s industrial warehouse past, for Greystar’s corporate headquarters we looked to the dignity of Charleston’s classical civic buildings to express Greystar’s commitment to the life of the city,” said Gary L. Brewer, the RAMSA partner who led the design of both buildings.
Brewer said the two buildings are among the first to use the city of Charleston’s new Height District Ordinance, which allows more density on the upper peninsula under guidelines written by DPZ.
An open inside
Inside, Gensler and the interior design firm Elizabeth Stuart created what Greystar calls a “free address” office, meant to let employees work in whatever way suits them best.
The offices have 289 sit-stand workstations, 130 touchdown seats that can also be used standing and 71 conference rooms and collaborative spaces, the company said. A central staircase connects three floors of workspaces, conference rooms, phone booths and amenities. Employees also get a coffee bar, fitness center, yoga studio and locker rooms with showers.
“By blending a variety of collaborative spaces with options for heads-down work, we created a unique, nearly office-free environment that reflects the casual collegial culture while providing a structure to showcase Greystar’s expertise to their clients and investors,” said John Gaulden, principal and co-managing director of Gensler Charlotte.
Elizabeth Stuart, the interior design firm’s principal, said the designers drew inspiration from the building’s “panoramic views of the Charleston Harbor and Ravenel Bridge.”
The building also supports Greystar’s push to go paperless, has motion-sensor lighting to save power and has filtered water machines to replace plastic water bottles, according to the company.
A Charleston company with global reach
Faith founded Greystar in Houston in 1993 and moved its headquarters to Charleston in 1999, the company has said.
It now manages and operates an estimated $160 billion or more of real estate in nearly 200 markets, with offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. It manages more than 500,000 apartment units and student beds, making it the largest apartment operator in the United States, according to the company. Its investment management business oversees about $36.1 billion in assets, including nearly $14.2 billion under development.
In April, the National Multifamily Housing Council ranked Greystar the largest U.S. apartment manager for the ninth year in a row, Greystar said.
Faith said the new building’s design is meant to “facilitate greater collaboration and productivity among our teams.”
