The only indication that the building at 4487 Columbia Road used to be a grocery store is a tarp-covered sign in the parking lot. When the light falls just right, you can see "Winn-Dixie" through the mesh covering.

Go inside the building, past the calming sounds of a waterwall in the reception area, and there's no mistaking you are in one of Augusta's most modern offices.

The 45,000-square-foot former supermarket is now the nerve center for Georgia Bank & Trust Co., which has housed more than 150 of its "back office" employees at the site since October.

The $8.5 million investment makes it one of the metro area's larger examples of suburban "adaptive reuse" -- taking an existing structure and renovating it into something for which it was not originally designed.

"It is a good location for us. It had the right infrastructure, the fiber (optic) lines in the immediate area," said Ron Thigpen, the chief financial officer for the bank, which has experience with adaptive reuse, having completed the renovation of the historic Cotton Exchange building into its downtown branch office.

The Winn-Dixie store closed in 2005 along with seven others in the Augusta-Aiken area.

Mr. Thigpen said the bank was also interested in the old Waccamaw store near Augusta Mall -- a location that is now being renovated by French call center company Teleperformance into a support center for health insurer WellCare Health Plans Inc. -- but decided on the grocery property because it is a standalone structure.

The building, which the bank refers to as its "operations center," houses more than a dozen bank departments, including accounting, information technology and credit underwriting.

Most employees at the 18-hour operation are housed on the ground-floor section, with others occupying space on the 9,000-square-foot second-floor addition that the bank's contractor, R.W. Allen & Associates, created during the renovation. The addition boosted the property's total space to just under 54,000 square feet.

Before the center's opening, the bank's departments were scattered across the city in spaces with varying degrees of comfort.

"We were just on top of each other," said Sherry Wiggins, the bank's information technology manager.

Aside from all-new furniture and fixtures, the office boasts energy-saving technologies such as motion sensors that automatically turn off unused lights and a backup generator that can keep the power to the mainframe computer for eight hours on a single tank of diesel fuel.

"Our employees are overwhelmed having a first-class facility," said Regina Mobley, the bank's group vice president and operations center manager. "It really made a statement to them."

Mr. Thigpen said the operations center can accommodate up to 220 employees, giving the building a useful life expectancy greater than 20 years -- longer than it operated as a Winn-Dixie.