Walmart has unveiled its new headquarters set on a 400+-acre home office in northwest Arkansas that was established with the help of SWA, a global landscape architecture, planning, and urban design firm. The retail giant's highly developed, recently opened operations base includes an outdoor environment that stretches around 12 office buildings and other constructions that owe their existence to a team of notable architecture firms led by Gensler.

Located in Bentonville, where the company was founded in 1962, the property accommodates over 15,000 daily on-site employees. The new grounds of Walmart Home Office are intended to serve as a model for the next generation of sustainability-driven corporate campus design and to revitalize Walmart's presence in its birthplace in the Ozarks.

Focused on Green
Inspired by regional landscapes, the landscape architecture threads native Arkansan ecosystems through the campus, with over 100 acres of native and adapted plantings, over 5,000 trees, and 13 acres of constructed lakes and bioswales to manage stormwater. The plan carefully preserved mature canopy in its place in addition to relocating trees across campus, integrating familiar environments like highland forests, bluestem prairies, seasonal streams, and pollinator habitats.

 
"Contemporary workplace design was forever changed by the pandemic [...] in many ways, the home office anticipated these changes, centering community-oriented design, indoor-outdoor connectivity, flexibility, and social cross-pollination," says Gerdo Aquino, co-CEO of SWA. "Like many, we spent the past few years seeking solace in the outdoors and found extraordinary beauty in the landscapes where the Ozarks melt into lowland hills. That was really our jumping-off point: to instill feelings of rootedness, authenticity, and home by folding those ecosystems into the design."

Healthful Journeying
Developed to encourage wellbeing and sustainable transportation, the home office enjoys a broad network of trails anchored by a central pedestrian and cyclist thoroughfare that traces the path of a creek. Positioned entirely within the campus boundaries, the man-made stream was designed and engineered to integrate with the surrounding area's natural topography and watersheds as it connects to Town Branch Creek to the northwest and Osage Creek to the south. In this manner, the stream functions as a multi-use corridor that adjacent amenities tie into.

Another beneficial design element is a seamless integration with regional eco-friendly routes. Weaving through the center of campus, a one-mile forested greenway serves as the campus's primary circulation route, connecting employees to Bentonville via the Town Branch Trail and paying homage to the seasonal creeks and karst geology that once characterized the site through stacked limestone embankments. At its north and south terminus, the path links to the 40-mile Razorback Regional Greenway, a popular shared-use trail spanning Northwest Arkansas. The home office also features Rob's Trail, comprising over two miles of soft-surface path that loops the site and is named after former chairman Rob Walton. This organic approach to planning the site dissolves the boundaries between the new facilities and surrounding landscapes, encouraging employees to explore the expansive grounds with its 7-mile network of complete streets, shaded walkways, multimodal trails, and soft-surface paths. Sustainable transportation options are further incentivized through approximately 316 electric vehicle charging stations and 1,000 bike parking spaces on campus.

Maintaining Fresh Flows
At the north and south ends of campus are more than 13 acres of constructed lakes and bioswales that collect, filter, and redistribute stormwater across a vast irrigation network. This system treats up to 52 million gallons of water annually. A series of small bioswales capture stormwater and direct it towards a larger, central swale. Water from the north drains toward the north lakes, and water from the central and south areas of campus travels through the central swale to the south lakes. During this process, water is naturally cleaned before it enters the lakes for storage and re-use in the campus-wide irrigation system. The man-made lakes also store condensate from air conditioning units throughout the entire campus. To complete the cycle, water is filtered and circulated through mainlines to irrigate all tree and understory planting with a combination of spray heads, subsurface drip irrigation, and tree bubblers. The irrigation is primarily intended to support plant establishment, operating minimally after that point.

Architectural Credits
Beyond the campus's sprawling forests and meadows, the idea of "big nature" is carried into the facilities themselves as a nod to the state's nickname, "The Natural State." Largely built with mass timber, the home office includes 12 Gensler-designed office buildings, a fitness center by Duda|Paine Architects, a childcare center by Page Architects, and a food hall by Miller, Boskus, & Lack. A hotel and welcome center are the work of 5G Studio Collaborative and Boka Powell, along with a central conference and training hall. In collaboration with the architects, SWA designed WiFi-enabled courtyards and amenity areas that provide flexible gathering spaces for outdoor work and events. Helen's Amphitheater - a central gathering space on campus nestled beside Sam Walton Hall - is a terraced venue designed to host events ranging from corporate gatherings to community concerts. Built from locally sourced stone, the area incorporates dogwood trees beloved by its namesake, the late philanthropist Helen Walton.

Impressive Numbers
The emphasis on sustainability shows strong in key metrics of the new campus design. For example, the project boasts 48 trees per acre of open space, 50% permeable space, 40 miles of regional trails connected to the site, and over 2.5 miles of soft surface trails on its grounds. In addition to physical sustainability measurements, Walmart has set an ambitious target of having 10% of its associates commuting by bike, as nearly 50% of the local workforce lives within 5 miles of campus. Construction began in 2017 with a targeted completion date set for January 2026.

The Principals' Views
SWA declared Walmart Home Office "A blueprint for an ecologically sensitive campus design, providing climate-friendly commuting options." Gensler notes that the home office is "fully integrated into the community and inclusive of the natural beauty of Northwest Arkansas [while] encouraging community building - a key feature of tomorrow's livable cities." Foremost among the assessments, the owner of the groundbreaking campus praises it as: "Unmistakably Walmart."