Facebook is about to move its headquarters from Palo Alto to Menlo Park, a 57-acre campus about 30 miles south of San Francisco. The campus was formerly occupied by Sun Microsystems until it was bought over by Oracle Corp last year. With headcount growth of about 50% a year, it was hope the new site with 11 buildings and about 1 million square feet could accommodate the current hungry 2,000 Facebook employees, and 600 million friends, of course.

It was less than two years ago when Facebook moved into the 150,000 square foot office space at 1601 South California Ave in Palo Alto but the rapidly growing company had practically outgrown the current office before it even moved in so much so that the management has to lease additional space at 1050 Page Mill Road. The new site would be leased with an option to buy from Rreef, a unit of Deutsche Bank that bought it from Oracle last year.

Facebook plans to move in some employees by July this year and the rest of its 2,000 workers, including its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, on site within 10 months. If you’ve been working there as a former Sun Microsystems employees before you may not like the place because it’s kinda isolated. Known as Sun Quentin (in reference to San Quentin prison about 40 miles north), the site is surrounded on three sides by water, and separated from the rest of Menlo Park by railroad tracks and a divided highway. 

As for food, there’re not much restaurants around except for Jack in the box and Starbucks so unless you’re willing to drive all the way to Ikea in East Palo Alto to get some decent foods, you may just settle for Facebook’s own cafeterias which provide three meals a day. Hey, if the SUN Microsystems former staffs could survive at this campus for two decades, it shouldn’t be that bad. But would this new campus huge enough to fit the forever growing Facebook?

SUN had 3,600 employee on site so it’s a matter of time before the current 2,000 Facebook work force with 50% growth exceed the number. Compare to SUN’s engineers who had private offices, Facebook employees work in unpartitioned spaces so the new site could easily fit more than 3,600 workers. However, the site could legally accommodate only 3,600 workers, as determined by an environmental impact report. If Facebook decides to expand beyond this number, it has to negotiate with Menlo Park.

But for now the focus is on getting the campus ready for Facebook employee. It would be interesting to see how San Francisco architecture firm Gensler would renovate the new site considering the existing Facebook office is so cool in design. It won’t have corporate structure design and upscale resort-like as in previous Sun’s design but instead would be spot an urban streetscape as revealed by Facebook project co-ordinator.

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April 6th, 2011 by financetwitter

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