There’s a little city tucked away in the City of Manassas.
Located at 10371 Central Park Drive in Manassas, National Vendor Management Services (NVMS) offers a “home away from home” to their more than 30 employees, in their office building – decorated to look like ‘Small Town USA’.
The company, which provided real estate and commercial property management and preservations services – like property inspections, foreclosured home clearing and management – moved to the large warehouse-like office space in 2014, and began transforming the space.
“We provide feet on the street all over the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico,” said NVMS Owner Chris Cook.
The office has cubicles designed to look like small homes, a school house, a non-denominational church, a Swiss chalet-style bakery, a retro diner eating space, and a Town Square, along with several other buildings.
“10 years ago we did an inspection on a little architectural firm that was based out of Atlanta, Georgia…and saw that they had done these little cubes – instead of cubes – these little houses…and I thought that was a pretty cool idea,” said Cook.
According to Cook, it wasn’t much more of a financial investment to build up the little city versus building out traditional “cube farms”, so he decided to move forward with the project.
But the project has not been without challenges. According to Cook, there are limits on the amount of flammable materials in an office space, so they’ve had to get creative in how they build out the city, using flame retardant materials from companies that make the same products for Disney.
Cook has had is business located in the City of Manassas for some time, and loves its convenience.
“It’s been great – it’s a nice little location. It’s convenient off [Route] 234 bypass…it’s a pretty convenient place to get to,” said Cook.
While the office certainly has visual appeal for any person walking in off the street, Cook said that the on-going project is really a way to give back to his employees.
“It’s really just for the staff. The reason we can do something like this is because of the hard work of the staff, so it’s really kind of just trying to create a unique and fun work environment,” said Cook.
