For the first time in decades, the Stables to be home for one well-known company only

For decades, a variety of companies — many of them creative ones related to media — have occupied the Stables.

About a century ago, the building at 322 S. Mosley served as actual stables for horses that delivered ice in the area.

Now, the development company TGC Group is moving its headquarters there.

“The history of the building’s cool,” said TGC founder Nick Esterline. “It’s just a fun old building and fits our culture and fits our style of life.”

TGC is knocking down its current building at 125 N. Emporia to use the property as parking for the new IMA Financial Group headquarters at Douglas and Emporia.

Esterline said his company had looked at moving to property it owns across Emporia from its current office, but he said he decided that would be part of the IMA project as well.

“We think we can enhance the overall building by having additional parking right there.”

He calls the Stables “just a gorgeous, gorgeous building” with “big wood beams” and lots of natural light.

“We’re maintaining the integrity of the brick and wood and the stone and everything. We’re not doing anything to modify the historic look of that building.”

Esterline hasn’t decided if the name will change or not.

Bonnie Tharp, whose Copp Media has been in the building for eight years, said she’s leaving with mixed emotions.

“I loved that building. I loved its character. … There isn’t another building like that in Wichita.”

She points to “windows that were horse-head high.”

However, she and her daughter, Nicole Cooper, have now purchased their own 3,400-square-foot building at 449 N. McLean across the Arkansas River from Cowtown and are renovating the 1970s structure.

“We think it will be unique once it’s been completed,” Tharp said.

She ran her company out of her home for two decades before moving to the Stables, and that’s where she’s working right now due to the pandemic. Tharp said she considered making it permanent but decided she and her team miss collaborating too much.

“There is something to be said for a work culture when you all work from the same place. You can only do so much on a Zoom meeting.”

Several business owners from the Stables like working with each other so much they’re all now in something of a mini Stables of their own at 900 N. Tyler.

That includes Joel Nollette’s media production company Get Reel Productions; Curtis Gross’ Joust Inc. video editing and motion graphics firm; Mark Bourgeois’ Avacar Financial; and Dave Allen and Chris Gill’s Dunn Allen Design, which changed names to Bryckroad Creative Studio with the move.

Allen said it made sense to locate with Nollette and Gross.

“We work hand in hand on projects a lot anyway.”

Bourgeois said though he has a financial firm instead of a creative one, “I’m very creative.” He called himself an “outside-the-box thinker.”

Allen said initially, he and the others who moved with him didn’t want to leave downtown.

“We just couldn’t make anything happen.”

There are benefits, though, such as less-expensive rent and an office close to home, at least for Bourgeois.

“It’s never fun to be upended,” Gross said. “In hindsight, I don’t know that it was a bad thing.”

That’s how Cindy Nolte of Pop Machine Agency feels as well.

She had only been at the Stables for a couple of years but called it “a great incubator … for creative people.”

Now, she’s tripled her space at nearby 420 S. Commerce St.

“This is kind of a blessing in disguise for us.”

Heather Hanson, who has the Hanson & Wright marketing and branding agency with Ken Wright, feels so much the same way she calls it “the greatest blessing ever.”

“Honestly, when we first found out about it, it was a little unsettling,” she said of moving.

Now the agency is at 10500 E. Berkeley Square Parkway in the Waterfront.

“It’s just worked out really perfectly for us,” Hanson said. “It just feels like we … have our own little space now.”

Dave Quillen of the Quillen Elsea marketing firm has been at the Stables for more than two decades and was one of the only ones who didn’t seem fazed in the least to be moving. That’s perhaps because he’s mostly retired.

“I’ve been hiding out from new business for a decade.”

That’s why he prefers to say he’s now in an “undisclosed location.”

“I’m not looking for anybody, and I don’t think anybody’s looking for me.”

This story was originally published September 8, 2020 at 4:47 AM.