Offices and Commercial

Design of commercial office buildings contributes 20% of our turnover in the Property sector. We work with property developers creating space to be let on the open office rental market, corporate clients developing space for their own occupation and with institutional property investment funds. Our activity in this sub-sector is very much concentrated in the central London market, with a portfolio of prestigious projects in the City and the West End.

Current trends in the office market include a tendency towards mixed-use schemes and ever longer spanning floor plates. Many of the office developments we work on include elements of residential and retail use. Planning conditions in Westminster in particular generally result in some residential apartments being required in addition to the principal use of the land for provision of office space. This is driven by a long-term planning strategy to increase the numbers of people living within central London in order to relieve the strain on the transport infrastructure. Also, internal columns seem to be becoming a thing of the past as we now frequently design floor plates with spans of 18m. This benefits our clients by increasing the flexibility of space planning and maximising lettable area and hence rental returns.

A further development is the emergence of sustainability as a design parameter in all buildings rather than in special 'one-off'  projects. While this has been largely Government-legislation led, clients in the sub-sector are starting to attach market value to buildings with greater environmental features. This is having the effect of raising the consideration of sustainability in design from mere minimum legal provision required to a higher status as enhanced value is beginning to be attributed to more sustainable projects.

We have longstanding relationships with a broad range of stakeholders in the commercial office markets we work in. We have formed strong bonds with developers, architects, institutional property investment funds, project managers, property agents, planners and freeholders such as The Crown Estate.

We focus our delivery on the needs of the client recognising that the aims and objectives of every project are different. We listen to our clients' needs and tailor our service to what is actually required rather than produce a standard set of repeated deliverables. We evaluate all available options for feasibility and efficiency in any given situation to ensure the solutions we deliver are already optimised to maximise benefit to the client.

As a consulting business our value is contained in the talent and knowledge of our staff. We recruit both at graduate level from leading universities and at chartered engineer level with to maintain a varied knowledge and skills base that is broad and deep. We encourage our staff to keep abreast of developments both technical and commercial to ensure we are leaders in the sub-sector. The value of this knowledge is fed back to our clients in the quality of the service we provide.