Slated to open in 2026, a new entertainment building at The Park in Berkeley Heights will bring a brewery, multiple restaurants and bowling lanes to The Connell Co.’s flagship campus. — Rendering by Minno & Wasko Architects and Planners/Courtesy: Connell
By Joshua Burd
Lunch at The Park in Berkeley Heights isn’t what it used to be, especially at the office building known as RT 300. That’s where The Connell Co. recently unveiled a series of modern, inviting dining and social spaces for tenants, from an expansive food hall to a cocktail lounge and game room — all with custom furniture, bright millwork and other upscale touches.
Like many other parts of the sprawling campus, they’re also available for the public to rent.
“These are now all event spaces,” Shane Connell, executive vice president of The Connell Co., said during a recent tour of the space. “We now have an event calendar and brochure that shows that you can rent this socially for evening activations or corporate events — so the design had to be nice enough that it felt not like a cafeteria, but a fine dining institution that’s rentable.”
It’s an early glimpse of Connell’s plan to open The Park to the public — from wine tastings and cooking classes to 50th birthday parties like the kind it hosted last fall — as part of a decade-long, $500 million update of the campus. That plan will grow exponentially next year, with construction now underway on a 60,000-square-foot entertainment building that will house a brewery, several restaurants and bowling lanes, creating a new destination for both nearby residents and workers from the property’s 1.5 million square feet of office space.
Connell has also broken ground on the first of two luxury apartment buildings that are slated for the 185-acre property, which is just south of Interstate 78 and 22 miles from Manhattan, with additional plans for ground-up retail space along the new pedestrian corridor.
“The goal is a 20-minute neighborhood — everything you need is within 20 minutes,” said Connell, whose family built the campus starting in the early 1980s. Today, its five office buildings are home to the likes of Fiserv, HP, Samsung and dozens of other companies with a combined 9,000 employees, who occupy the site alongside a 176-room Embassy Suites hotel, Life Time Fitness and acres of outdoor space.
Connell’s plan is ambitious, complex and painstakingly integrated — all with a level of branding and merchandising that is unlike anything at other commercial properties in the state. At full build-out, The Park will have more than 20 standalone brands operating on the site, from original restaurants like Emberside Brewery to its Fieldhouse health and fitness club. There’s also Table & Banter, the on-site catering and hospitality company, and even plans for a line of original craft beers that honor the Connell family’s roots as the world’s largest rice trader.
Many of those concepts will be woven into a master brand known as Round Table or RT, which the firm has assigned to its office space, the new apartment buildings and, eventually, the hotel.
“This is the biggest difference between us and what other people are thinking,” Connell said, striking a comparison to other mixed-use campuses. “When we think about culinary, wellness and hospitality, we said ‘Let’s actually create brands that support that.’”
SLIDESHOW: Upgrades at RT 300 and 400
They’re on full display at The Park’s three multitenant office buildings and its coworking space — known as Round Table Workspaces and Round Table Studios, respectively — which served as the starting point for the repositioned campus. The developer began by modernizing 200 Connell Drive roughly six years ago, adding a jewel box façade, upscale dining options and its first Fieldhouse location. That gave way to a full-building, 428,000-square-foot lease with Fiserv Inc. at Building 100, followed by the most recent upgrades at buildings 300 and 400, including the new Table & Banter Market, cocktail lounge and other spaces that serve both buildings, as well as a larger version of the health and fitness club.
Already, the updates have been critical for many of the 40 or so companies that occupy The Park, especially smaller tenants that hope to lure their employees back to the office.
“For companies that are working on their own floorplate and having to generate all that interest internally, it’s a big task,” said David Sullivan, a New York City-based designer who recently joined Connell’s on-site team. “So this supportive infrastructure really helps people with that effort, to get people interested in coming back to the office, creating that culture and doing a lot of that development that would be prohibitive for a lot of companies to do themselves.”
Sullivan, who is among several consultants, chefs and other professionals that Connell has recruited from New York City, is the mastermind of the high-end, custom furniture that appears throughout Round Table Workspaces and Round Table Studios. He’s also guiding the interior design, branding and concepts that will permeate The Park’s next phases, including the new apartment buildings and shopping, dining and entertainment hub known as The District, working alongside Minno & Wasko Architects and Planners as the architect of record.
The first apartment building is now rising just outside RT 300 and 400, with plans calling for 179 rental homes slated to open in 2026, giving way to a second phase with another 149 units. The District is also under construction and on track to open next year, creating a new center of the campus with multiple food concepts, including:
- Emberside Brewery
- Rosa Azul, a Mexican restaurant with authentic cuisine and hand-crafted cocktails, as well as a taqueria that will offer window service for the outdoor garden and playground area
- A speakeasy-style, 120-seat venue called BASH, featuring a wood-fired steakhouse, event spaces, multiple bars and bowling lanes
SLIDESHOW: The District
The building, which will be adjacent to a custom playground, will feature a sleek seating area that transforms from indoor to outdoor space through signature guillotine glass doors designed by Seatle-based Olson Kundig. That’s in addition to some 60,000 square feet of street-level retail space that Connell is now marketing to would-be tenants, alongside a planned 20,000-square-foot spa by New York City-based Bathhouse.
Upon completion, the corridor will be akin to a Main Street that connects office users at RT 300 and 400 to the Embassy Suites.
“This is a 10-year plan, and we’re a little bit more than halfway,” Connell said. “It’s one thing to build a great yard, but if your house isn’t great, no one’s going to buy that house.
“So we had to fix the house first,” he added, referring to the modernized office space, “and now we’re building the yard. That’s the phasing and that’s the program.”
Notably, renters at RT Residences will have membership to Fieldhouse 400, the full-service health club for RT 300 and 400. Connell also recently launched a public membership program for the gym that’s available to the community at large, while it plans to roll out a “social membership” known as Penta that will provide even broader access to The Park’s services and amenities, offering VIP access to restaurants, use of the facilities and other perks.
Whether the public takes to the social club concept remains to be seen, Connell said, but the new offerings will undoubtedly boost the value of the office space.
“We’re going to do this because it’s a tenant amenity,” he said. “And then the question is: Is there a culture of people that have left New York City, where there is a social club scene that’s really popular, and they’re coming out here, where a golf course is maybe the only opportunity for them to join some sort of club? So is there is a social need of young millennials who are coming to the suburbs looking for something?
“We’ll see. We have to do it anyway.”
