How fond are you of your office? If you are struggling to concentrate in an airless block, with plywood panelling and concrete pillars, your response is likely to be unenthusiastic. But it may unsettle you further to know that developers have such 1960s and 1970s horrors in their sights as your future home.
The bleak prospects for commercial property (December was the worst month on record, with returns falling by 3.7 per cent, according to the Investment Property Database) are encouraging many within the industry to think again. With the values of most homes holding relatively firm, some developers have abandoned their hopes of attracting corporate tenants with expensive refurbishments. Instead they are creating homes where there were only office complexes and shops.
The process is apparent in Central London. Georgian townhouses in such areas as Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury and even Mayfair are being wrested from commercial use and offered to the many aspiring buyers with the budget for a top-end London home who remain frustrated after several years of fierce competion for prime property. Savills is handling 53 Bedford Square, a Grade I listed townhouse with a mews house to the rear, which retains grand rooms and ornate cornicing despite a century in business. The former legal office is on the market for £6.95 million, and Savills expects that the eventual buyer will return it to residential use.
In Berkshire, the former De Beers headquarters near Ascot - a grand 1938 Portland-stone mansion in 20 acres of landscaped grounds - has already made the leap. It was recently converted into Charters, a spa and 14 apartments which are on the market priced from £1.65 million.
Yet the trend is also claiming the most unlikely office buildings. To the intense disappointment of neighbours longing for demolition, developers are buying up buildings from the 1960s and 1970s in town centres and suburban hubs to reinvent them as luxury apartment blocks. Comer Homes, a developer based in North London, has built itself a niche in such refurbishments. It started out converting listed period properties, but is now marketing Ocean Views, a redevelopment of the old naval base near Chesil Beach, on Portland, Dorset, where the Duke of York trained. It has also converted Towerpoint, a former British Gas building in Enfield, into 148 apartments. With grand lobbies and large floor plans, corporate buildings can make spacious conversions. Mark Lees, the chief architect at Comer Homes, says: “A lot of them were in satellite locations, such as Enfield, Harrow and High Barnet, which have great railway connections and access to shops. This makes them perfect for residential development.”
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These days, satellite offices are more likely to be established in cheaper regional cities: but even these places are often blighted by obsolete stock, thanks to the changing IT and other requirements of commercial tenants. Knight Frank in Bristol is marketing the 42 one and two-bedroom units that make up Apollo Apartments, the modest conversion of a former Legal & General building. Savills in Poole has Orchard Plaza, a 115-apartment redevelopment of the former tax offices in the Old Town. Priced from £145,500, some of the flats have views of the Isle of Purbeck, a prospect surely wasted on the ruthlessly focused breed that is the tax inspector.
A conversion into residential use, while complicated, is usually cheaper than demolition and rebuilding. But despite the environmental benefits of recycling buildings, many projects are scuppered by the resistance of local councils. Heat Architects was behind the redevelopment of St John’s Place. This mish-mash of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s offices in Clerkenwell, Central London, with “every sort of horrible 1970s cladding that you can think of” was turned into eight sleek apartments, with ceiling-to-floor windows and an eye-catching two-storey penthouse. Yet Charles Humphries, a partner at Heat, says: “Often a commercial building needs to be on the market for a long time, even a year, before a council can be convinced that there is no commercial interest. They should not be, but councils can be very stodgy.”
Such bold makeovers often achieve the best results. EAShaw, the Central London agent, advised on the development of Glasshouse, a 14-flat scheme carved from an uninspiring 1970s office building on Shaftesbury Avenue. Lisa Hollands, a partner, says: “The building was relatively characterless, so it was possible to put in a very clean-lined, ultra-modern development, and it sold off-plan very quickly. Buyers tend not to mind, and quite often do not even notice, that a property has been converted from office use.” A two-bedroom, two-bathroom warehouse-style apartment in the building is now for let through EAShaw at £1,600 a week.
Comer Homes also goes by this “gut the building and start from scratch” approach to redevelopment, and has developed a technique that involves bolting on balconies to provide permanent outside space. The tinted glass exteriors characteristic of many Comer Homes schemes are a modern, but acquired, taste.
Some developers manage to be even more distinctive - by, strangely, remaining truer to aspects of the original design. Durkan is rebuilding the 1960s Lennig House in Croydon, turning it into Bauhaus, a 189-apartment and mews home scheme that will be ready this summer. When completed, the once state-of-the-art office block will be unrecognisable - apart from the elaborate original pre-cast-concrete sculpture by William Mitchell that adorns the lobby and stairwell.
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Professor Fran Lloyd, of Kingston University, who is researching Mitchell’s work, says that the artist went on to commissions for Harrods and the Paris Ritz, but started as an experimental artist who was busiest at the time when many architects, artists and developers were united in a desire to bring art to the masses. Jan Howe, the marketing manager of Durkan, says: “It reminds me of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.” The rarity value of such art, a forgotten adornment of many post-war buildings, is boosting appreciation of it - but not yet of the unloved offices in which it was once housed.
OUT OF WORK
- Buildings from the 1960s make easy conversions because, using windows for ventilation, they had to be kept small.
- Conversions of such buildings enjoyed popularity in the 1990s, but became rarer this decade while commercial returns were healthy, says Yolande Barnes, of Savills.
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- Earlier conversions can be better value because the builders struggled to supply natural light and therefore had to keep the units large. Ms Barnes says: “They also tend to be higher quality. It was a much tougher market then and developers just had to be better.”