By Audrey Jensen – Senior Reporter, Wichita Business Journal
May 5, 2025
As the office market in downtown continues to grow, one Wichita-based developer is looking outside the city’s core for its new corporate headquarters.
TGC Group, a hospitality management and construction firm, has plans to move out of its downtown space in exchange for a rural campus.
“Where we’re currently located here downtown is a great property for us, but we’ve just simply outgrown it,” said Nick Esterline, president and founder of TGC.
The new headquarters reflect an ongoing office trend since the Covid-19 pandemic of businesses reconfiguring their space needs and locating in areas that work better for their employees.
The company has had offices in downtown for nearly 25 years and is currently located at 322 S. Mosley St., where about 20 to 25 employees work in person regularly.
“The biggest downside to leaving downtown is we love it here, downtown is great, but creating an opportunity to do something different was just a little more important to us,” Esterline said.
TGC’s new headquarters will be relocated from its 8,300 square-foot downtown spot to a 30-acre estate in southeast Wichita over the next year.
The company has been planning its new corporate space for a couple of years since it acquired the east Wichita property in a December 2023 auction.
“Personally my family and I, we love the country, we love the outdoors,” Esterline said. “It used to be a home estate, and we saw that and went, ‘Boy, wouldn’t it be cool to create a country-estate work environment where our staff and visitors and everybody that comes to TGC every single day get to experience the lifestyle that myself and family love?'”
They expect to start construction this month on a single-story, 11,560 square-foot office structure near Harry and 143rd streets, a couple miles south of Kellogg Avenue, and wrap up a year from now.
It is designed to resemble a farmhouse so that it blends in with the surrounding environment, and it will be built up against a large pond on the property.
“If somebody didn’t know it was our office, you’d drive by and go, ‘Holy cow, somebody built a big house back there,'” Esterline said.
A building permit was recently issued for the office valued at $3.7 million. The project includes the office featuring a combination of heavy timber and wood-framed structure with a mezzanine, a parking lot, detention pond, outdoor covered patio spaces and site scaping, permit filings said.
TGC is constructing the building, which was designed by Shelden Architecture. Baughman Co. is the civil engineer.
The new office building will add to several amenities on the property that TGC’s employees can take advantage of. Esterline envisions their staff being able to take a lunch break by the water or bring their families out on the weekend for a barbecue.
They plan to convert the existing residential house on the property that’s about 4,500 square feet into an extension of the main office with space for private meetings.
A horse barn on the property will also remain intact and be used to house some livestock.
TGC wants to turn the auxiliary building on site into a fitness-centered space with a basketball goal and gym equipment.
The overall goal was to create an experiential work environment.
“Creating that environment where people feel like they’ve got a place to go recreate if they want to I think is a positive thing,” Esterline said.