Terrell Place

Speculative marketing system for a historic Washington, D.C. office building competing in a trophy-driven leasing market.

Terrell Place is a historic office building in Washington, D.C., named after civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell. It sits across from the National Portrait Gallery and within walking distance of the Capital One Arena and a major Metro hub, placing it directly within a dense cultural and commuter corridor.

The building retains key architectural elements from the original Hecht Company department store facade, alongside contemporary interventions such as a full-height seasonal LED installation in the lobby that turns the entry experience into a shifting media surface. As home to Meta’s Washington, D.C. offices, it sits in a leasing market increasingly defined by trophy assets, where visibility and perception carry as much weight as physical infrastructure.

This project builds a speculative multi-channel marketing system that translates the building’s architectural identity into a structured leasing narrative across print, presentation, and digital formats. What mattered most here was not just clarity of communication, but how the system could hold dense, multi-layered information without losing hierarchy or direction.

The system is anchored by a “North Star” motif derived from the angular geometry of the building’s original ironwork facade. Instead of functioning as a decorative mark, it becomes a fixed structural reference that layouts consistently resolve back to, shaping hierarchy and reading flow across both narrative and data-heavy spreads.