For a workplace redesign, it’s hard to imagine a project that would need to serve as many types of stakeholders as the new Creative Artists Agency (CAA) office opening in Nashville this July.
As one of the world’s leading sports and entertainment agencies, CAA caters to a wide range of outsized personalities, from NBA legends to touring musicians to college football coaches to YouTubers. But it’s also regularly bringing in new, young, unsigned talent, and often their parents or family members. And, of course, this new office in Nashville is also a 9-to-5 workplace for 160 employees, from the hotshot agents signing multimillion-dollar deals to the 23-year-old assistants changing out of their office shoes after work to go cover the concert of a potential client.
To meet these very different users, CAA decided to design spaces for all of them. Beyond workspaces and offices, there are private conference rooms, a music listening lounge, a sports bar, wellness rooms, two speakeasies, and a central social hub. Whether an agent is hosting a longtime client for an informal catch-up, a young executive is trying to bring an even younger talent into the company roster, or a client is in town to prepare for a big campaign or tour, CAA’s new office was designed to offer a variety of spaces and themed areas to accommodate their needs.
“We just wanted to show, through programs and rooms, that you could be comfortable here,” says Howie Nuchow, CAA managing director and sports co-head.
A very Nashville office
CAA worked with the architecture firm CannonDesign over the past several years to bring this idea to life. They drew inspiration from the city itself, where CAA has had an office for more than 35 years. The new office covers 75,000 square feet across two floors in a building that’s part of the Nashville Yards development, a 19-acre mixed-use development in downtown Nashville, and the spaces inside celebrate the city’s deep music culture and history, and its growing presence as a sports mecca in the South.
This local culture shows up in a range of spaces throughout the office, including in its jazzy listening lounge space with dark club chairs and a grand piano in the corner, in a rooftop terrace with panoramic skyline views, and in the galleries worth of sports photography covering hallways and office walls.
“We really had like 10 different micro projects within the project,” says architect Emily Stampanato, CannonDesign’s commercial practice leader. “We had to change the mindset and treat each one almost uniquely because in the end we wanted it to read as an ecosystem of spaces that all work together. But each one had to have its own DNA.”
The amenity spaces are rich, and befitting an office that is geared so essentially around appeasing its clients. But it’s also an office for office work, be it done by CAA employees or the driven client borrowing space to iron out a new concert tour or think through a sponsorship deal. There’s some conventional hierarchy in the floor plan, including a traditional boardroom and window-lined offices looking out on the city, but also guest office spaces for clients to use, communal seating in the central hub, and work-lite environments in the lounges, speakeasies, and terraces.
Nuchow, who came to run CAA’s Nashville office about five years ago, says the amenities and workplace diversity in the new office are ways to attract talent—both on the client side and for CAA’s staff. “You couldn’t encourage somebody to come to the office the way it was set up before, without all of those elements,” he says.
The new office was shaped to a large degree by CAA employees. CannonDesign conducted more than a dozen interviews with employees and held about eight focus groups to understand how staff at every level used the office, and how it could improve. One surprising bit of feedback led to a last-minute design tweak, turning a bathroom into a plush employee dressing room designed for the regular experience of young agents and assistants needing to prepare for a night out with clients or attending concerts of musicians represented by the agency.
“Assistants work all day long and then they have to change clothes and go cover bands at night. Instead of getting dressed in bathroom stalls, we asked could we create an amazing area for them to bond with their colleagues as they’re getting dressed and ready to go out together,” Nuchow says.
It’s an unusual consideration for an office to make, but just one of many that embrace the unique and diverse nature of what happens inside a top talent agency. The design of CAA’s new Nashville office aims to help this culture flourish.
“There’s a social climate that I haven’t seen in an office environment in a lot of years, if ever,” Stampanato says. “We knew we had a special group of people, that we couldn’t just build a program that was a cutting-edge office. It really had to be curated and scripted to this specific audience.”