1. REPRINTED FROM THE ISSUE OF JANUARY 19, 2015
BY BILL FALLON
bfallon@westfairinc.com
THE MATRIX CORPORATE CENTER at 39 Old
Ridgebury Road in Danbury recently inked
leases with two new tenants —Macromark,
a direct marketing agency, and the Eastern
Collegiate Athletic Conference — that took a
total 17,500 square feet between them. NewOak,
a Manhattan-based financial advisory firm, took
another 10,000 square feet, upping a presence it
had maintained in a Matrix corporate suite.
The three companies’ names and logos
dominate a celebratory banner in the remade-
to-wow, two-story Matrix atrium in its central
core.
The core is a marble and glass showcase
of meeting rooms, banquet halls, food facilities
and the amenities of a downtown, like a barber
and a nail salon. A business A-list that includes
General Motors, Praxair and Boehringer
Ingelheim is already in residence in 15 buildings
surrounding the core.
“Leasing interest has picked up with the
economy,” said Aaron Smiles, managing direc-
tor for commercial leasing for the Class A, four-
story, 1.3 million-square-foot office complex and
nearly 1 million-square-foot garage, all built on
5,000 columns.
On-site footprints range from several hun-
dred thousand square feet to zero square feet
in the form of a recently added virtual office
service run through the Matrix Executive Suites
program. In between, typical spaces are 10,000
square feet to 30,000 square feet.
Smiles said the complete building, which
opened in 1980 as Union Carbide headquarters,
is 70 percent full now.
The pier construction technique makes for
a broad, even layout. All first floors are on the
same level so that, in the hilly landscape, some
first-floor spaces are 70 feet in the air, with
outsized views of hardwood forests and old
Tech, amenities raise the Class A bar
farm walls from almost every interior spot in
the complex.
Matrix has been owner/operator since July
2009 and in that time has pumped $20 mil-
lion into remaking the now 35-year-old former
home to 3,300 Union Carbide workers. The old
limousine garage, by way of example, is now a
high-tech gym with a golf simulator occupying
its own room.
The 15 buildings vary in detail but occupy
two basic layouts: smaller buildings with four
floors of 11,000 square feet per floor and larger
buildings with four 20,000-square-foot floors.
The architect, Kevin Roche, wove ease of
use into the design. Each floor of each build-
ing is served by one of two central parking
garages with a total 2,700 covered slots occupy-
ing 970,000 square feet. The building’s total 2
million square feet put it on par with the Empire
State Building for size and, in a twist, for empha-
sizing the view.
A quartet of Matrix executives that included
Smiles; Leroy Diggs, Matrix Corporate Center
general manager and vice president for acqui-
sitions for Matrix Investment Group; Michael
Brown, Matrix executive director of real estate
services; and Mike Guirgis, Matrix property
manager and director of hospitality, gave a tour
of the facility recently. Each, in turn, pointed to
the convenience of parking near one’s final des-
tination, whether that destination is a corporate
meeting or the high school prom. It poured rain
MATRIX UPS THE ANTE
Matrix’s Aaron Smiles, commercial leasing agent, left, and Michael Brown, executive director of real estate services.
Photo by Bill Fallon

2. Conference rooms at Matrix in three different sizes. Photos by Bill Fallon
this particular day, ably highlighting the ben-
efits of all-covered parking.
On the corporate level, Matrix is headquar-
tered on Long Island, N.Y., and owns and oper-
ates 2.5 million square feet of space divided
between 8,000 multifamily housing units and
the commercial sector. The Danbury building
is its largest property.
Brown said there are plans to expand on
the 100-acre campus as part of what he termed
a “live, work, play” ethos. The area surround-
ing the Matrix facility is filling with homes
that include Virginia-based Harbor Group’s
Crown Point at the Reserve Apartments and
Pennsylvania-based Toll Brothers’ Rivington
development.
Brown, like the others, cited the region’s
ease of transportation. Interstates 84 and 684
are close, and Ridgebury Road warrants an
exit sign off I-84 despite being several turns
from the northbound exit. He compared access
favorably with the often traffic-choked arteries
along the county’s southern tier.
Like gears or spokes, the Matrix build-
ings surround the garages and a central core.
The core holds the atrium/main entrance and
burgeoning services like a dry cleaner, barber,
coffee shop, convenience store and a branch
of Mutual Security Credit Union. The cafeteria
boasts restaurant-quality food and serves 1,200
workers each day. The core also hosts banquet
facilities that accommodate up to 500 for busi-
nesses or for the likes of proms, weddings and
bar/bat mitzvahs.
The surrounding 100-acre campus offers
trails and old stone walls. Matrix recently
upgraded the facility as an IT hot zone of Wi-Fi
and teleconferencing capabilities all protected
by backup generating facilities. More tech work
is underway.
Brown said change is coming, also, in the
form of new entrances from the outside and
in a greater push toward interconnectedness
among tenants. “We have a limousine service
here that gets all its business from within the
building,” he said. “We want people to know all
the infrastructure — the IT infrastructure, the
services — are here to connect all the tenants.
All these things are offered no matter the size.
For businesses with different products in differ-
ent markets, we provide a custom fit. Efficiency
is becoming more and more in demand.”