Bell Bank has come a long way since its founding as State Bank of Fargo in 1966 and the newly opened $100 million Bell Bank Tower in downtown Fargo will serve as both the new company headquarters and a fitting monument to that progress.
The opening is the culmination of a three-year process. Bell Bank acquired the building, which was constructed in 1973 and most recently served as home to Bank of the West, in June 2021 and demolition began in February 2022.
The project is massive in scope. Almost everything besides the bones of the building is completely new and it took more than 100 companies, subcontractors, and vendors to bring the project to culmination. Staying true to their local roots, Bell Bank relied on 75% of that work to come from local companies and Olaf Anderson, another local company, led the project.
“The scope of the project is pretty unique for us and for Fargo,” Jeff Furstenau, Olaf Anderson CEO said. “One of the things that I’d say is the coolest part of this is that if you look out at all of the other big buildings downtown, those were built by big companies—Bell Bank stayed local. To me, that’s the most unique thing. The scope is also unique. They spent a lot of money on some really nice things.”
The new building will allow Bell Bank, which has about 900 employees in the metro area, to consolidate all of its non-branch location employees into three locations. 300 employees will be housed at the Bell Bank Tower. 200 employees will be in the Bell Insurance building at 15 Broadway N, and another 250 will be at their 13th Avenue location, which was serving as the company’s headquarters prior to the purchase of the Bell Bank tower.
Let’s take a tour of the building.
“We moved the main entrance off of Main Avenue to the other side,” Patrick Chaffee EVP/Banking, Wealth Management and Insurance said. “Now we have underground parking for customers as well. You can still come in from Main and Broadway, but this is the main entrance.”
“We’ve tried to pay homage to our roots throughout the building,” Brantner said. “We call this the Mickey Stone. One of our founders was named Mickey Snortland. All of the stones on the wall come from the Snortland family farm which is just outside of Sharon, ND. We have five of these throughout the building.”“This lobby area is actually a brand new facility, this part used to be a parking ramp,” Chaffee said. “By getting rid of that parking ramp, we have added 85,000 square feet of building. We’ve never been able to have all of our forward-facing employees on one floor like this.”“Here we have a 72-foot tall ceiling,” Brantner said. “This is pretty cool to see. Not many banks have this type of feel.”The grand stair.
Did you know the blue walls in the Bell Bank Tower are made out of recycled denim jeans?
“The Solberg family is one of three families that are majority owners in the bank,” Brantner said. “Richard Solber is our chairman and this is a quote of his. We really wanted to show the history and growth of the bank throughout the building.”“This is our other entrance,” Brantner said. “We wanted to pay homage to our roots in Fargo.”“We have about 1,000 pieces of artwork throughout the building,” Brantner said. “Almost all of that artwork comes from local artists and photographers.”“We’ve grown so much since we were founded in 1966,” Laine Brantner EVP/COO said. “This is a great way to kind of bring everybody together. One of the things we’ve learned post-pandemic is our employees miss that connectivity. We designed the fourth floor specifically for the workforce of the future. Whether you are in the office five days a week or you work from your house, we have office spaces on the fourth floor called Skylines that you can reserve and use.”“This is our new boardroom,” Brantner said. “This table seats 20 people and there’s room for us to set up chairs around the outside. We have four 90-inch screens so people can see from all sides what is going on.”“Our Town Hall is complete with a catering kitchen that can serve about 300 people sitting at eight-person tables while our CEO delivers his once-a-year town hall where he gives an update on what’s going on at Bell Bank. It’s a time when we look backward and forward to the next year. It’s completely with a patio as well, which offers some very nice views. We’ll also use this room for a number of different events we do for our employees.”“This room is dedicated to our Pay It Forward program,” Brantner said. “We’ve given away about $30 million in the last 16 years through this program.”“This is our fifth floor,” Brantner said. “There aren’t any named offices on this floor. Half of this floor is for mechanical and the other half is for employees… This is the main breakroom for the building. We have smaller versions of break rooms on every floor, from six through 12, but we want people to come down to this floor and connect with other employees from different departments.”“When we surveyed our employees, the two most requested things were a shower and a fitness room,” Brantner said.“All of the offices are designed essentially with the same glass, and that’s intentional,” Brantner said. “We’re not going to be frosting this or anything. We want folks, whether they’re in the middle or not, to be able to get a bunch of natural light. That’s important to us.” “When we purchased the building, one of the things we wanted to do to be able to do is leverage the views of this building,” Brantner said. “So, we added a 14th floor.”“This is kind of quadranted out into four distinct spaces,” Brantner said. “We have a wine room. We have a sitting area. We have a full commercial-grade kitchen so we can make meals. There’s a dining area. There are two 85-inch TVs, and a full bar. All of the windows slide up so this can be an open-air hospitality space. We’re excited to be able to host clients and events up here.”
