DETROIT - Visteon Corp.'s new $300 million headquarters will be a village rather than a giant corporate building.
One million square feet of Visteon's 265-acre site in Van Buren Township, Mich., will be transformed into a small town for 4,000 employees, according to details released last week. Woods and a lake border the site. Van Buren is about 25 miles west of Detroit.
The new headquarters, called Visteon Village, will be made up of:
Visteon, North America's second largest auto supplier, has headquarters in Dearborn, Mich. Employees work in more than a dozen buildings throughout southeast Michigan.
"We knew we couldn't accomplish everything we needed to until we consolidated," says Stacy Fox, Visteon's senior vice president of corporate transactions and legal affairs.
The move will shift the supplier from the shadow of its former parent and largest customer, Ford Motor Co.
Visteon received local and state financial incentives to move to Van Buren Towship. "Annual carrying cost on the village will essentially be a wash of what we're paying now" in leases and operating costs, Fox says.
Employees could begin moving into the new buildings before August 2004, and the move will be complete by the end of that year.
SmithGroup Inc. in Detroit is the project's architect-engineer.
