PayPal Headquarters Campus

PayPal’s San Jose headquarters campus was refashioned after COVID to strengthen firm culture, ecology, and outdoor work life. Clients PayPal and JLL engaged RELM for landscape redesign that accentuates Northern California’s native landscape character while improving how staff and visitors move through a campus previously built in phases by different landscape architects.

RELM preserved mature and old-growth trees through careful study of root systems and drainage flows, routing accessible pathways that connect campus areas without disrupting critical soils or hydrology. New understory plantings bring seasonality and tactile dimension beneath the existing canopy, addressing a campus that had canopy cover but lacked viable lower planting layers. A restored living-system pond and related plantings increase biodiversity within onsite water features, naturalizing edges that had been underperforming as habitat.

Stained IPE decking and pergolas establish flexible outdoor workplaces at multiple scales—from small meeting vignettes to larger collaborative settings—anchoring hardscape and softscape programming across the grounds. Connectivity and accessibility were central to the scope: safer, clearer routes knit formerly fragmented precincts into a coherent outdoor workplace network so movement between buildings feels intentional rather than improvised.

Collaboration with workplace and construction partners supported reactivation of central outdoor spaces for collaboration and respite. The completed landscape orients to native planting, tree preservation, and usable outdoor rooms rather than ornamental filler, aligning ecological performance with everyday employee use on a corporate campus seeking healthier post-pandemic patterns of work.