Medicis making itself a new home in Scottsdale

A video game room, a fitness center and a feng shui consultant — Scottsdalebased Medicis Pharmaceutical Corp.’s new headquarters won’t be your typical office building.

But Medicis isn’t your typical corporation either.

The little local company regularly faces down the big pharmaceutical giants and has established its dominance in dermatological drugs with such market leaders as Dynacin, Triaz, Omnicef, Vanos and new product Solodyn.

In recent years, Medicis splashed into the field of aesthetic dermatology with Restylane, which fills up facial wrinkles and plumps up lips, and has even more products waiting FDA approval.

It’s hard to believe the company is less than 20 years old.

CEO Jonah Shacknai relocated his staff — all 10 of them — in 1995 from New York to a suite of offices at 44th Street and Camelback Road in Phoenix.

On Thursday, Shacknai presided over the groundbreaking for his new digs, a 150,000-square-foot office building slated to be completed in first quarter 2008 on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.

Medicis is the first big corporate tenant for Riverwalk, a 187-acre office and retail development by Chicago-based Alter Group.

Riverwalk is pegged to house 2 million square feet of offices, a 500,000- to 600,000-square-foot shopping center mostly devoted to home furnishings, and a river flowing throughout the property, said Kurt Rosene, Alter Group senior vice president.

The Arizona Design Center already has set up shop at Riverwalk with 13 or 14 tenants, Rosene said.

Now Medicis is ready to make the leap.

The company is overflowing its 75,000-square-foot building at Hayden and Via de Ventura in Scottsdale, Shacknai said. Medicis had about 200 local employees a year ago when it began searching for new space.

“We’ll open (the new headquarters) with 540,” said Shacknai.

He added he has hired 40 people in the last three months.

And just in case the new place fills up fast, Medicis has an option on a second equalsized structure, boosting its capacity to more than 1,000 employees, said Mark Prygocki, Medicis’ chief financial officer.

Prygocki said in designing the new headquarters, Medicis tapped employee focus groups, “to discover what best describes our culture.”

The company already uses a feng shui consultant, Prygocki said, and he’ll have a big say in the design of the new office space in every aspect from placement of furniture to cubicle colors to art.

Feng shui is an ancient Chinese practice that links the placement of items and arrangement of space to spiritual harmony.

Medicis’ new offices will be mostly without walls, with honeycombs of office cubicles, lots of natural light and “pink and white noise” that will keep voices from wafting through the vast openness, Prygocki said.

“We believe in an open environment, that it will be more collaborative,” he said.

There will be a few meeting rooms, and a conference center that can seat 100 for training or large sessions, he said.

And there will be get-away-from-work areas.

Medicis has designed into the building plans a “cardio” center, with stair steppers, treadmills, and room for aerobics and Pilates classes, a game room with ping pong, video games and play station setups, and a reading room for those looking for more passive respite, Prygocki said.

And there will be private nursing rooms for new moms, Shacknai said.

The cafeteria will offer indoor and outdoor dining, and hot, cold and healthy entrees, he said.

Medicis expects intensity from employees, Shacknai said, and that requires places to de-stress.

The play areas are meant as mini-getaways that “cause a little distraction,” he said.

Medicis follows the lead of several other former Scottsdale-based companies, such as Fender Musical Instruments, Cold Stone Creamery and Rural/Metro Corp., that jumped across Pima Road to build on Indian land.

Features of new Medicis headquarters

• 150,000-square-foot original building

• Second 150,000-square-foot building optional

• Design based on principles of feng shui

• Open space with honeycomb cubicles

• Game room

• Fitness center

• Conference center for 100

• River flowing to the door