For most of the past two years, the six-story wood-framed building rising at the edge of FAT Village has been easy to walk past without a second thought. Construction fencing does that. But if you've guessed at what's going inside once the scaffolding comes down, the safe bet has probably been something that serves food or pours drinks. Fort Lauderdale's downtown has spent 2026 absorbing one restaurant announcement after another, and FAT Village itself is billed as a mix of apartments, galleries, and dining. A six-story building with that kind of visibility seems like an obvious candidate for another kitchen.
It isn't. The building is called T3 FAT Village, and according to an Axios Fort Lauderdale report published earlier this month, its first confirmed tenants are GXO Logistics and CBI Workplace Solutions. One runs supply chains. The other designs offices. Neither one is opening a dining room.
What Everyone Assumed Was Going Up
The confusion is reasonable given the scale of what's happening around it. T3 sits inside a roughly 5.6-acre redevelopment led by Hines and Urban Street Development, a project that carries a price tag north of $500 million and includes 600 apartments split across two residential towers, plus tens of thousands of square feet earmarked for restaurants, retail, and gallery space. Framed that way, FAT Village reads like a single hospitality-and-housing project, and it's easy to assume every new structure inside it serves that same purpose.
T3 doesn't. It's an office building, and a specific kind of one. At roughly 180,000 square feet across six stories, it's described in local coverage as Florida's first mass-timber office building, built with exposed timber columns and wood ceilings instead of the poured concrete that defines most of downtown's skyline. The building is part of Hines' national T3 platform, shorthand for Timber, Transit, and Technology, a naming convention that points directly at its second distinguishing feature: it sits two blocks from Fort Lauderdale's Brightline station.
The Actual First Tenants
GXO Logistics, described as the world's largest contract logistics provider, is opening a 35,000-square-foot regional office inside T3 to support business across the Americas and Asia-Pacific. CBI Workplace Solutions is relocating its Fort Lauderdale office to the building as well, moving from its current spot on Las Olas.
Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis called the building "a new crown jewel" for the city when the tenant news broke. CBI's CEO, David Longo, offered a more specific reason for the move, saying his company was drawn to the building's "distinctive design, flexibility and connection to the surrounding neighborhood." Neither comment mentions restaurants, art, or nightlife. Both are about where people will actually work.
Why an Office Tower Changes More Than Another Restaurant Would
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you've only been tracking FAT Village through its dining and residential headlines. A restaurant opening changes a block on weekend nights and maybe a few weeknight dinners. An office building with a global logistics company and a relocating design firm inside it changes a block five days a week, starting well before anyone's thinking about dinner.
That timing matters because of what isn't open yet. As of a February 2026 report on the building's structural topping out, interior build-out was expected to run through the rest of 2026, with the apartment towers and T3 itself targeted to open later this year and the rest of the site's restaurants and retail following in 2027. In practical terms, the office workers are arriving before the neighbors and before most of the ground-floor storefronts that are supposed to feed them lunch. For a few months, at least, this stretch of Flagler Village will have a daytime population with nowhere built specifically to absorb it yet.
CBI isn't a brand-new employer moving to town from somewhere else. It's a Las Olas tenant relocating a few blocks north. That's a smaller shift than a company moving in from out of state, but it still means a group of people who currently walk Las Olas at lunch will start walking NW 1st Avenue instead. Multiply that by GXO's incoming staff, and the sidewalks around a building most residents have only known as construction noise start carrying foot traffic on a schedule that has nothing to do with Art Walk, happy hour, or the weekend.
What Still Runs on the Old Schedule
None of this touches the one ritual that's outlasted every phase of FAT Village's redevelopment. The monthly Art Walk still happens on the last Saturday of every month except December, currently running from about 7 to 11 p.m., with galleries and studios along NW 1st Avenue staying open past their usual hours for the crowd.
The detail that trips up newer attendees isn't the art. It's the parking. If you've been going for a while, you already know the move:
- Park at the Sears Town lot, at the corner of Federal Highway and Sunrise Boulevard. It's free.
- Catch the Sun Trolley, which runs a free shuttle loop from that lot through Flagler Village roughly from 6 to 11 p.m. on Art Walk nights.
- Skip the lots directly on NW 1st Avenue near the galleries unless you're certain they're marked and open to the public that night.
That last point isn't a small caution. Visitor accounts of Art Walk nights include cars booted and towed from lots near the galleries that turned out to be private or unmarked, sometimes within an hour of parking. The Sears Town and trolley routine exists precisely because the blocks around FAT Village were never built with Art Walk-sized crowds in mind, and that hasn't changed just because a mass-timber office tower went up next door.
It's worth sitting with that contrast for a second. A global logistics company is about to occupy a building most people walked past without noticing, while the parking workaround for a decade-old monthly art event still runs through a Sears parking lot. Flagler Village is changing in some very specific, very funded ways. The way you get to Art Walk on a Saturday night isn't one of them yet.
What's Still Ahead
A second residential tower, expected to bring roughly 250 more units, is planned for a later phase of the site, with full build-out targeted around 2027. That means the balance on these blocks between office workers, new residents, and Art Walk regulars is going to keep shifting for at least another year. The version of this corner that exists once T3's neighbors are finished being built will look different again from the one GXO and CBI are moving into this fall.
For now, the honest answer to "what's going into that wood building" is a logistics company's regional office and a workplace design firm's new address, not a restaurant, not a gallery, and not another round of apartments. Worth knowing next time you're walking past it on your way to catch the trolley.
If you're curious how changes like these ripple through property values and demand on specific Flagler Village blocks, that's the kind of hyperlocal read Tim Singer South Florida tracks closely. View homes for sale in the neighborhood, or reach out with questions about what's actually happening on your street.