Facebook planning home and retail expansion to headquarters

Facebook announced the details of their planned residential and retail expansion to its Menlo Park headquarters today, including bringing on the New York City branch of Dutch architecture firm OMA to design the project’s master plan.

The new space will be dubbed “Willow Campus.” Facebook’s Vice President of Real Estate John Tenanes announced via a press release:

Our vision is to create a neighborhood center that provides long-needed community services. We plan to build 125,000 square feet of new retail space, including a grocery store, pharmacy and additional community-facing retail.

[...] We hope to contribute significantly to the housing supply by building 1,500 units of housing on the campus, 15% of which will be offered at below market rate.

Tenanes says the company will officially file with Menlo Park this month and hopes to have the first phase (which will include housing, office space, and a grocery store) completed by 2021. The whole thing may wrap up by 2023.

The company bought the location at 1360 Willow Road in 2015 for roughly $400 million. The social network’s Willow Campus plan would completely redevelop the 21-building, 56-acre block, presently known as the Menlo Science and Technology Park.

Founded by Rem Koolhaus, OMA designed buildings like the Prada Epicenter in Los Angeles and Seattle’s Central Library.

A few renderings of the proposed site came along with the announcement, but the firm hasn’t revealed any other specific intentions for the design.

Facebook wants to frame the expansion as its way of giving back to Menlo Park, boasting that the new project will add community resources and expand mass transit—not directly, but by “providing planned density sufficient to support new east-west connections and a future transit center.”

It’s also a way of keeping up with the Joneses, as rivals like Google and Apple are in the process of major expansions and housing experiments of their own.

• Invest In Menlo Park [Facebook]
• OMA
• Facebook Buys 56 Acres [SV Business Journal]