Introducing our New Columbus Studio

For the past 26 years, the distinctive office building at 515 E. Main Street has served as the home of DesignGroup’s Columbus studio. Designed by our own team (led by Principal and Lead Designer Jack Hedge), 515 E. Main was an early demonstraEon of energy-saving design and a major investment in the nascent Discovery District. With its open central staircase, flexible spaces, and large, sunny skylights, it served our business (and other tenants) well.

But with a growing team, new technologies, and evolving work practices, we realized it was time to reimagine what our Columbus studio could and should be. So, we chose another downtown neighborhood experiencing a dynamic transition: Franklinton. On July 1, our Columbus team moved into the fourth floor of The Peninsula Building on 330 Rush Alley.

We believe we’ve found the perfect spot for our Columbus operation and the future of DesignGroup. Our new home offers modern amenities, abundant parking, amazing views of the Columbus skyline, and easy access to parks on each side of the Scioto River. We’re across the street from the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) and next door to the lively Junto Hotel, the perfect place for off-site meetings or a very comfortable stay for visiting clients.

Like our previous home, this new space was designed with care and purpose by an internal team, this time led by Design Director Joe Mayer and Senior Interior Designer Alana Haslow. The site was selected a year ago, and they completed the build-out plans in just three months — while maintaining their usual slate of client work. They did it by treating the assignment as a formal engagement, with its own project team and number.

Joe and Alana didn’t do it alone, of course — Project Architect and Designer Daniel Mathur and Project Manager Jocelyn Krosky played key roles in planning and execution, and other staff were engaged at key points in the process for review and discussion. Most requests were feasible and implemented, thanks to our team being well aduned to budgets and practical constraints. One major outcome of their feedback: we retained dedicated workstations for all employees rather than adopt a free-address model. It preserved personalized setups while allowing for free-address solutions if capacity pressures arise.

This detail and many others make the space attractive, efficient, and so well suited for our future. I’m incredibly proud of the speed and thoughtfulness of their vision for the space. Here are just a few highlights.

• The new layout rethinks space alloca#on to match contemporary, largely paperless workflows, reducing individual desk footprints and significantly increasing areas for collaboration and hybrid work. It includes more sound-dampened private phone rooms, huddle rooms for collaboration, formal and informal meeting spaces, and flexible hoteling and lounge-style touchdown areas for visiting clients and staff from our Pittsburgh and Indianapolis studios. Planning targets included capacity for current staff plus additional headcount as DesignGroup continues to grow.
• The design preserves valued aspects of the previous office — such as abundant natural light and consistent, non-hierarchical workstations — while adapting them to a new context. Open office areas are aligned along window walls to maximize daylight, with desks set back from the façade and shades on east and west exposures. The team selected an office location that primarily faced north to reduce glare at workstations.
• The social hub is a signature space, combining the functions of the former kitchen and large meeting room into a single, highly flexible gathering area with a kitchen, beverage amenities, a river view, and access to a balcony. It’s designed to be in constant use for many collaboration styles from large meetings to a few colleagues working together on a project. The area includes three massive displays and discrete, dimensional microphones for presentations and group video collaboration. Mobile whiteboards can be placed near or alongside the displays as needed.

The plan clusters a model shop near the interiors material library to create a flexible workshop zone that can expand for “all hands” pursuits and contract for everyday use, contributing to the overall strategy of futureproofing through spatial variety, adjacency, and openness rather than fixed technology assumptions. A workstation is integrated into the space for vendor presentations, collaborative sessions with clients, and design charrettes.

• Franklinton is a key part of the project’s appeal, offering easy access to parks, coffee shops, restaurants, local breweries, and a highly bikeable trail network where major paths converge near the building. Our new studio includes bike racks and a gender-neutral shower and restroom to encourage cycling to work.
• Culturally, the office reinforces DesignGroup’s egalitarian ethos by standardizing workstation. All workstations are identical, with specific privacy requirements for HR and finance accomplished through orientation rather than a different workstation. Meeting rooms were renamed through a staff competition, shifting from person-based names in the old office to a new system referencing waterways, parks, and neighborhoods. Our largest conference space, “The Founders Room,” reveres those who started our firm. We’ve even included a private “quiet” room for nursing, stretching, or personal respite. It has possibly the best view in the office.
• For clients and visitors, the new space presents a high-end professional environment that showcases our design capabilities within a modern, stylish, efficient footprint. In our previous building, technology was gradually adopted over time; here, it’s fully integrated and future ready.

From a process standpoint, the project gave the design team direct experience on the "owner's side," further deepening empathy for clients managing leases, budgets, logistics, and move coordination alongside design decisions. Combined with decades of collective experience designing workplaces, and intimate knowledge of our own operations, this dual perspective informed decisions about collaboration space, workstation sizing, privacy needs, and hybrid work infrastructure — experience that can be applied to future client projects facing similar timelines and organizational transitions.

The studio on E. Main Street represented who we were and what we could become. Our new space represents the next generation of DesignGroup. So we say farewell to a building that was so good us, and hello to a new studio with even more potential. I can't wait for you to see it.