Parliament | The Bird House is Now Open
Living room and dining are of The Bird House, a retreat house located in Columbia, Missouri
In 2020, we bought a building when everyone told us commercial real estate was a terrible investment for a small creative agency.
We stayed in-office when the entire industry went remote.
And now we've built The Bird House when most companies are cutting real estate costs and consolidating to smaller spaces.
We don't do a lot of data analysis before making these calls. We just know what we believe, and we act on it. Sometimes that makes us early. Sometimes it makes us look a little ridiculous. But it's worked for us so far.
Here's what we believe: The most transformational work happens face-to-face.
We've been running Brand Being workshops for a few years now. I've done them in co-working spaces, in our office, over Zoom, and in client conference rooms. And what I've learned is that the physical environment matters more than I initially wanted to admit.
You can't do deep strategic work in a conference room with fluorescent lighting and yesterday's brainstorm still on the whiteboard. You can't have hard conversations about misaligned culture when someone's popping in every twenty minutes asking about a client deadline. And you definitely can't ask a founder to be vulnerable enough to name their deepest values while sitting at their own desk where their team can walk by.
The work requires displacement. It requires getting away.
So we built The Bird House.
It's 1,300 square feet of what Bodine White calls "California cool meets Midwest heart." Three private bedrooms for overnight workshops. Open gathering spaces that adapt to whatever the work needs in the moment. A galley kitchen that keeps distractions at bay. Every detail chosen with intention after years of this work.
And here's the counter-cultural bet we're making: while the world becomes more digital, more AI-saturated, more fragmented across time zones and Slack channels, we're investing in the opposite.
Everyone is optimizing for efficiency. For cost savings. For the flexibility to work from anywhere. And I get it—there's real value in that flexibility.
But we're betting that in a world where you can generate a logo in thirty seconds and write copy with a prompt, the thing that becomes more valuable is the work that can't be automated. The conversations that don't happen on Zoom. The breakthroughs that come from three uninterrupted hours of thinking together in the same room.
There's no data to support this decision. There's no McKinsey report that says "in 2026, companies will suddenly value in-person strategic work again." We're making this bet on intuition, on pattern recognition from sixteen years of doing this work.
It's the same intuition that told us to buy our building when everyone said we should stay flexible. The same gut feeling that kept us showing up in-office together when we could have easily gone remote like everyone else.
We're not always right. But we're willing to move before we have proof.
Because beautiful spaces matter. When you're asking someone to be vulnerable enough to admit where their brand and culture are misaligned, to name what keeps them up at night, to articulate values they've never put into words before—that deserves a space that reflects the significance of the work.
The Bird House is open for booking now. $600 for a full day. $1,200 for overnight workshops (30-hour rental: 3pm check-in, 9pm checkout the next day). Our Brand Being clients get first access, but we're also making it available to any team that needs the kind of space we wish had existed when we were building Hoot.
And massive gratitude to Bodine White for designing a space that somehow feels both inspiring and grounding at the same time. They understood the assignment.
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