Crepe-making rooms, hideaway “cave” areas, human-sized nests, and more — you’ll find them at Google’s new Kirkland offices.
The tech giant will officially open its Kirkland campus expansion next Tuesday, doubling the size of its existing engineering center just east of Seattle. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Rep. Suzan Delbene will speak at a private event Tuesday to celebrate the opening.
The new 180,000 square-foot LEED-platinum certified building has a number of unique and eccentric features as noted above, in addition to a skylight, a living roof deck, cafes, and micro-kitchens. The land formerly housed a chemical mixing and packaging plant and Google completed two environmental cleanups to remove contamination at the property.
Google’s Kirkland office, which now totals 375,000 square feet, is the company’s third-largest engineering center. More than 1,000 employees work on products like Google+, Cloud, and Chrome.
Google was one of the original Silicon Valley tech giants to establish an engineering center in the Seattle area, opening the branch in Kirkland in 2004. Since then, a number of other tech giants (Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com, Splunk and Zynga) have established engineering centers in the region.
Google, which also employs hundreds more at offices in Bothell and Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, has been involved with the Kirkland community over the past several years. This past August, the company paid $3 million to transform an abandoned rail corridor into a new outdoor recreational space for its employees and the public that includes a basketball court, a sand volleyball court, a Crossfit/TRX fitness area, and a zip line. A few months prior, it donated $200,000 to the City of Kirkland to install a free public WiFi network.
And earlier this week, Google announced that it is launching its Self-Driving Car testing program in Kirkland this month, marking the third city where the company is test-driving autonomous vehicles.