Office of the month: Steam Packet House
One thing that Allied London’s Spinningfields development must have done for many in the city’s professional community is make them fitter, as they’re either having to traipse from below Deansgate back north towards the city’s traditional commercial core or they’re scurrying in the opposite direction from newly-renovated skyscrapers such as City Tower.
For those not so keen in putting in quite so much leg work, the newly-refurbished Steam Packet House offers a happy middle ground not just in terms of location, but also price.
The building is owned by Ribot Investments – a property trust set up by bookmaker Fred Done, whose son Peter is company secretary.
It has just spent £525,000 refurbishing the 100 year-old building, with the work completed by Redbridge Interiors finishing on time and to budget just before Christmas.
The refurbishment has involved the installation of chandeliers and period detailing accompanies by modern photographs which nod to the building’s original use as the former headquarters of the Steam Packet shipping company.
“It’s bang in the middle of the city,” said Will Lewis, a partner at joint agents OBI Property, which is joint agent on the building alongside Edwards & Co. “You’ve got new buildings such as Chancery Place just in front of you, Albert Square to your right and Spinningfields behind you.”
The area had fallen out of fashion with many in the city’s professional community, with BDO becoming one of the last major names to decamp when it moved from Cross Street to Spinningfields just under two years ago.
Yet Ribot’s commitment to overhauling the building shows that it retains faith in the area.
“A lot of landlords in this market might have just done a tart-up and pitched the space at £10-£12 per sq ft,” said Lewis. “But here they’ve developed really good space for £15 per sq ft. They’re one of the few landlords with enough financial clout to spend on this sort of speculative refurbishment.”
Edwards & Co partner Andrew Timms said that Ribot’s investment was already starting to pay off.
Law firm Linder Myers has remained as sitting tenant on three floors of the eight-storey building and the Britannia Building society retains the bulk of the ground floor retail space, which means the building is not elected for Value Added Tax (VAT) purposes on outgoing costs. As such, he said it would make a decent home for an insurance or associated financial services practice unable to reclaim VAT.
Of the four floors that are available, Timms said that one of the largest – the 3,460 sq ft first floor – is already under offer.
“For anyone with 20-40 staff members who doesn’t want to spend a fortune but to be in the prime core of the city, it’s ideal,” he said.
