Northgate Exchange

Speculative offices are built to a formula, and the formula is not stupid — it reflects what tenants have historically paid for. What it consistently undervalues is the ground floor, which is treated as a lobby and a security desk and as little else as planning will permit.

We had a developer client willing to test that.

Giving away the plinth

The ground floor gives up roughly six hundred square metres of lettable area to a double-height hall that runs through the building, open to the street at both ends, with a café, seating that nobody has to buy anything to use, and the building's main stair.

On the appraisal that is a straightforward loss. The argument for it was letting velocity: that the hall is what a prospective tenant walks into, and that a building which feels occupied lets faster than one that feels available.

Whether it worked

The building let fully in fourteen months against a submarket average, at the time, of around twenty-six. Rents achieved were about eight per cent above the comparables the appraisal had used.

We are wary of claiming that the hall caused all of that — the market moved, and the building has other qualities. But the developer has built two more since and put a hall in both.

Ask what a building is like to arrive at. Nobody signs a lease based on the net-to-gross ratio.

The rest is disciplined

Above the plinth the building is deliberately ordinary: a regular grid, a raised floor, a clear span, and a facade with a high solid-to-glazed ratio that keeps the cooling load down and the tenants' bills with it.

Making the upper floors boring is what paid for the ground floor to be interesting.