Office Space: Charlotte Hoopes Assistant Professor of Business Administration Charlotte Hoopes offers us a  tour of her office space’s colorful constructions.

By Kelsey Goodwin
November 12, 2026

Assistant Professor of Business Administration Charlotte Hoopes’ office in Childress Hall is part kids’ art gallery, part LEGO showroom and part scrapbook of the places that have shaped her career. Hoopes, who joined the Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics in 2024, holds a B.S. in accounting and Spanish and an MBA in general management from Brigham Young University, as well as a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests include person-environment fit; communication, leadership, and teams. This Spring Term, Hoopes will lead a new abroad course called the Business of LEGO, and Hoopes regularly incorporates LEGO activities into her Management and Organizational Behavior course. In this edition of our “Office Space” series, Hoopes shows us around her colorful office.

The funny thing is that my kids have built most of the LEGO sets in my office. I live in Charlottesville, and my kids don’t visit very often, but when they do, I usually have a set waiting for them to build. I grew up with LEGOs in my home, but I only have brothers, and I never had my own. LEGO has leaned into making botanical sets for adults, which are more decorative, and I really like those. You can see I have several of the flowers here.

I also use LEGOs in my teaching. I probably have four different LEGO activities I do in my current Management and Organizational Behavior class, and the colorful cubes up there hold the materials for them.

The unbuilt sets on the top shelf are special. The two on the left I bought at LEGO House in Denmark, and some sets can only be bought there. One is a replica of a wooden duck, one of LEGO’s early toys from before they made the plastic bricks. The other is a replica of the LEGO House itself. I haven’t built the one next to them yet [a replica of the set of The Office], but I love that they made it. There have been articles in The Wall Street Journal about how unbuilt LEGO sets can become investments. I may eventually build them, but they’re my example of how people save them and they become worth more.

I’ve been to LEGO House [in Billund, Denmark] twice, and I’ll take students there next year during Spring Term. The building was designed by a famous Danish architecture firm and was a dream of the LEGO founding family. It’s only been around for about a decade. It’s in Billund, where the company is headquartered.

These are sets I use in class, and I left a few built after using them this week. There’s an approach called LEGO Serious Play that’s used more in businesses than in educational settings, although it shows up in classrooms sometimes. When teams in my class are just starting to work together, I have them choose a subset of values from a set of cards, and then they build a representation of what those values might look like on a team. They’re not trying to build something aesthetically pleasing. The point is to create a metaphor for something. It’s also a fun way to get students active and shake things up.

LEGO is a really interesting company. It’s been around for almost 100 years, which is unusual, and nearly everyone in the world is familiar with it. It’s also been surprisingly well documented. I have a bunch of LEGO books here, and a lot has been written about the company from a business standpoint. That gives students a chance to study how all the different pieces of a business fit together, which they don’t always get to do in a marketing class or an accounting class.

LEGO also presents interesting conundrums. Sustainability is one of the company’s goals, and that’s a real puzzle when you’re pumping out plastic bricks. It’s a very successful company right now, but that hasn’t always been the case. There was a time when its survival was in danger, and how they navigated those downturns is a great thing to talk about with students.

Part of the inspiration for the course was that LEGO is building a factory in the Richmond area that’s going to be finished next year. The company doesn’t have very many factories, and it doesn’t currently have one in the United States. In the class, we’ll talk about why they chose Virginia and why they decided to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. I’m excited to see the course come to life. It’s inherently hands-on.

The challenge is not getting too many sets, because I’m running out of space. LEGO has also become a nice common ground. Students often bring it up when they come to meet with me, and I want my office to be an engaging space.

Pretty much everything on my walls has some sort of significance. That’s a picture of the windmills in Spain, the Don Quixote windmills. I took it on my study abroad when I was a sophomore in college, and that semester abroad was one of my highlights as a student myself. Now I get to take students on that kind of adventure.

My first job was at EY in Boston, in the Hancock Tower in Back Bay, so that’s what this painting is. I like watercolors, which is why these are all watercolors. I did my Ph.D. at UNC, and the one at top left is the Old Well, the iconic UNC landmark. This one is a park in Madrid, where I studied abroad. I grew up in the desert, so that’s my desert picture. And that’s Mount Timpanogosin, Utah, near where I did my undergrad and my MBA. It has a real presence in that part of the state. These are all just meaningful places, compiled together.

I like sea turtles. I’ve seen them a few times on vacation, and it’s just something I enjoy. Almost everything in this part of my office is artwork my kids have made me. My daughters painted some of these, my sons painted others, and my older son took that photograph on a trip he and I took together. They know I like turtles, so they like to make me turtle things. This is kind of my kid artwork gallery.

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