Inside Ford’s new world headquarters: Scratch kitchens, rotisserie chickens and design secrets

Some of that collaboration is expected to occur over food.

The new headquarters includes a 160,000-square-foot dining area with eight “kitchen concepts” that will feature rotating menus as well as take-home options such as pizza and $6 whole rotisserie chickens, decadent desserts and a juice bar complete with a herb garden.

“We have guests coming in from all over the world, so we wanted to make sure we have designed our menus to kind of play homage to that diversity,” said Grant Vella, executive chef for the new ]headquarters. “We wanted to do something different, push the boundary of business dining.”

Outside of the kitchens and dining areas, vegetation and outdoor spaces are meant to make for a more walkable-friendly campus compared with the automaker’s prior, largely street- and parking lot-locked facility.

“This headquarters is the cornerstone of our campus redevelopment, but there’s been a tremendous amount of work that we have done throughout the campus to really connect it and make it much more walkable for our employees,” Dobleske said, pointing to several facilities and areas, including a test track and 18-acre “Horsepower Park,” surrounding the building.

Inside the building are six courtyards, including a dual-level one at the center of the company’s new design studios to allow designers to take products outside to view them outdoors in natural light. Those design courtyards are exclusive areas that can only be viewed by the surrounding, private studios.

Most of the four-story building features outside natural light from the exterior glass walls as well as skylights and other windowed areas.

In addition to making a more walkable exterior campus, Ford wants employees to use purposefully designed stairs rather than elevators and escalators that are the primary modes of transportation in its most-recent 12-story headquarters.

Craig Dykers, founding partner of Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta that worked on the building, said each staircase in the building, especially in its 14 different arrival areas, are prominent and meant to be inviting to use.

“Obviously people don’t naturally want to climb a stair, so you have to design it very carefully so that people feel good about using the stair,” he said. “Part of the trick is that as you go up one flight, you don’t necessarily see the next flight, so it’s kind of a journey.”

Stairs inside the main lobby of the building are extremely wide and feature seating areas alongside the actual low-rise stairs. There’s also a coffee bar on a large landing above the main lobby.

The coffee bar overlooks a white artwork that features vehicle parts — one of many prominent pieces of art Ford purchased or has curated for the new facility. Others are photos or drawings of vehicles, while some are simply non-automotive artistic pieces.

Inside the company’s design operations are large studios with advanced clay milling machines, a spacious showroom that will operate as a modern design dome and a 64-foot screen showing virtual reviews and testing.

What employees will not see much of is the company’s logo, the well-known blue oval surrounding the “Ford” name. There will be a massive Ford blue oval logo on the outside of the building but not on its interior. Unless you look closely.

On some exterior glass walls, such as the company’s design operations, there’s a glass pattern that features the ovals accompanied by hidden numbers that represent Ford patents.

Ford declined to discuss the capital spent to build its new headquarters and design center, which was part of a previously announced $1 billion campus transformation that began under former CEO Jim Hackett, who previously led furniture company Steelcase.

Here’s a look inside the new world headquarters: