Cartersville, Georgia, population 20,978, may be a surprising place to find a major corporate innovation hub, but one architecture firm’s creative approach to housing a bustling workplace in a rural Southern landscape proves that sometimes more room allows for greater design freedom.

Integrated architecture and design firm Gensler designed this new innovation hub for Patcraft and Shaw Contract, two subsidiaries of the commercial flooring company Shaw Industries, in a city 42 miles north of Atlanta. The three-story, 67,000-square-foot think tank houses the company’s creative, marketing, and innovation teams under one very large roof. While most corporate office buildings divide employees by department, Gensler and Shaw decided that these ideation teams should share a single inspiring, collaborative space after analyzing the company’s mission. It’s a decision that, along with the choice to keep the innovation hub in rural Georgia, make the Shaw Create Center an unusual case study in workplace design.

The team used Gensler’s Workplace Performance Index, an online survey that the architects developed to analyze how people work in a particular company, in order to develop the best design. Gensler gives this survey to clients both before occupancy to gather employee input on their workplace prior to starting a design project, and after the completion of the project to measure the success of the proposed design solution.