ACHE Research Institute Health & Wellness Center
Not every significant building starts from the ground up. Sometimes the most meaningful design work happens when an existing building is given a purpose worthy of it.
The former corporate headquarters of Golden Living at 1000 Fianna Way is a five-story, 318,000-square-foot building on 54 acres in south Fort Smith — a substantial piece of real estate that sat underutilized after Golden Living relocated its headquarters to Plano, Texas. When Arkansas Colleges of Health Education purchased the property in 2020 for $5.8 million, they acquired not just a building but a platform for something considerably more ambitious: the ACHE Research Institute Health & Wellness Center, envisioned as the largest research facility of any osteopathic school in the nation.
Chasen Garrett Architects provided design services for two of the building’s five floors. The first floor was transformed into a community-facing health and wellness destination — a richly programmed space housing a large event venue, a culinary kitchen, a pottery studio, classrooms, an art gallery, a fitness center, and a variety of meeting spaces. It has quickly become one of the most active gathering places in the River Valley, drawing the broader community into a building that once served a single corporate tenant.
The fourth floor tells a different kind of story. That floor was designed as the Fort Smith campus of Haas Hall Academy — Arkansas’ premier public charter school and one of the most decorated academic institutions in the country. In its first year of operation at this location, Haas Hall Fort Smith was ranked in the top 5% of all public schools in Arkansas, the best score of any high school in the River Valley. Across all its campuses, Haas Hall is ranked #1 academically in Arkansas, #3 among public charter schools in the nation, and #15 among all high schools in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. It holds the highest AP Honor Roll status of Platinum, placing it in the top 1% of America’s most challenging schools, and maintains a 100% graduation rate and 100% college acceptance rate.
The Research Institute also houses the Biomedical Resource Center and the Center for Rehabilitation Research, opened in 2024, with research programs focused on oncology, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neuroscience, and aerospace medicine — work that puts Fort Smith on a map most people wouldn’t have expected to find it on.
