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DES MOINES, Iowa  —  We have been watching it go up for years, but the new Kum & Go building on Grand Avenue is finally taking shape. The employees and community are excited to see it finally finished. Developers say it should be completed in mid to late October of 2018. Once it’s finished it will have been under construction for three full years.

It started with the two-story underground parking, that alone took a year to build, but it grew from there adding six levels and 29-foot windows. Kum & Go says these are the largest insulated windows in North America. The windows were key in this open concept architecture that lets you see through the entire building.

“The idea of the architecture is that it’s indoors and outdoors are brought into one. And so, when you’re inside you don’t feel like you’re inside. There’s a lot of glass so we get a lot of natural light,” Kum & Go Senior Vice President of Store Development Niki DePhillips said.

DePhillips said there will be no closed offices right up against the windows. The company is mimicking this exposed concept in their everyday work by implementing to non-traditional desk spaces grouped by department.

“With all the different generations that we have in the workforce right now, we thought that by allowing a lot of different options whether it’s a standing type seat, like a bar stool height, or more like a traditional desk, or a café style, or we’ll even have like couches and some lounge chairs and so forth,” DePhillips said. “It really allows people to choose what works for them on any given day, any given task, hour, and come and go as they’d like throughout the building.”

This new building will have a multi-purpose room on the second floor that can hold 400 people, the third floor will have a designated quiet space for employees and the roof of the building will have a rooftop garden also only for employees. Three-hundred Kum & Go employees are expected to move from their current building in West Des Moines to their new headquarters right when it opens in October.

Instead of competing with the sculpture garden, developers wanted the new building to feel like a part of it. That is why the first and second floor will be open to the public. They really want to showcase their outdoor space. Developers say the actual building only sits on a third of the land, they encourage people to grab food from local food trucks and sit in their shaded seating areas.

“We’ll have a lot of trees, we have about 120 trees going in on site, lots of shrubs, we’ll also have some outdoor gaming that the public can use, kind of like adult playground equipment and bocce ball and then some tables and chairs,” DePhillips said.

Developers say there will also be a café and an art gallery that the public can use inside the first and second floor of the building. Though these will not be open right away.