A Look Inside International Leadership of Texas’ Office

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Non-profit organization International Leadership of Texas hired architecture and interior design firm Perkins and Will to design their new office in Dallas, Texas.

“International Leadership of Texas (ILTexas) stands among the nation’s fastest-growing charter networks. Currently serving more than 21,000 K-12 students across 21 campuses in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, College Station, and Cleveland, this free public charter school relies on its DFW-area headquarters for centralized administrative support. Eager for a new office that promoted cohesion, ILTexas moved its headquarters into a four-story, 60,000-square-foot building in Richardson and tapped Perkins&Will’s Dallas studio to spearhead the interior design. The project team created a light-filled, multi-functional space with special attention to enhancing a sense of community.

The ILTexas motto is “Others Before Self,” but to work selflessly, one needs a baseline level of support. To that end the Perkins&Will team transformed the office’s first floor into an amenity-rich, adaptive communal space that meets shifting needs at the company-wide and employee-specific level.

Past reception, one enters the wide community area, prime for everything from team lunches to holiday parties. Flexible and banquette seating options inspire spontaneous connection throughout this general-use breakout space that includes an IT genius bar and the office’s main break room—and focus rooms, to be inclusive of individual working styles. An enclosed professional development room on the same floor uses folding partitions with sound control to divide the space as needed to comfortably host events large and small, from town halls to online teacher-training sessions.

To best manage its dynamic state-wide community, the ILTexas team needed offices that fostered strong inter-sector communication. The Perkins&Will design team positioned open workstations by the windows, encouraging coordination and transparency and allowing natural light to flow through the space, into central glass-partitioned offices. With a series of test fits and surveys, the project team met the challenge of arranging the puzzle pieces that were ILTexas’s 12 departments, also physically integrating the school’s motto into the headquarters.

Supporting network-wide communication needs, the design team enabled ILTexas to create its own sophisticated audio and video assets with a studio outfitted for work such as voiceover recordings or addresses from leadership.
The new ILTexas headquarters prioritizes connection and wellness. The brand presence is strong: in a gesture to ILTexas’s proud affiliation with Texas A&M University, the design team unified the space by incorporating a maroon color palette, including accent carpeting in the university’s custom shade. And touches like wellness rooms—plus the characteristic Perkins&Will attention to safe and sustainable material selections, including biophilic elements—promote the ongoing well-being of those tasked with supporting the leaders of tomorrow.”