![]() ![]() It is poignant that the redevelopment will add elements that feature on the original drawings which have either been lost down the years or, in some cases, appear never to have been completed in the first place. ![]() Principally, this means retail will wrap around the lower floors and basement level one, moving all the servicing of the buildings off-street and into the lower basements, and adding offices and retail to one portion of the building. “Yet we’re cramming a whole host of uses into this incredibly tight site.” "You can’t go down particularly, you can’t go out and you can’t go up,” he adds. ![]() Added to this are limitations to the additional height of buildings in the area. “You have the tube conservation area and hence a retained facade almost entirely around the site," he says. Mr Shelton outlines how Olayan, to a greater degree, had to work within the footprint and envelope of the existing asset. “I’ve got 20-odd years of experience as a real estate professional and I’ve never seen anything as complicated as this,” he says. Exciting it may be – straightforward it is not. “The K1 development is about a third of the ‘island’ site that we purchased in 2010, and we thought the opportunity it presented was really exciting,” says Olayan managing director and head of real estate in Europe, Jonathan Shelton. When owner Olayan Group purchased the Knightsbridge Estate almost 10 years ago, it took on a site that had been in steady decline, with shop fronts in need of a makeover, and a somewhat higgledy-piggledy distribution of structures and internal spaces. Yes, this is the world of high-end retail, where logo-bearing carrier bags are proudly brandished as a rite of passage.īut its postcode alone has not been the guarantor of upkeep, certainly not in the case of the buildings themselves. Here, designer labels coo coercively at pedestrians with eye-watering price tags fluttering in the background. “I’ve got 20-odd years of experience as a real estate professional and I’ve never seen anything as complicated as this” Jonathan Shelton, Olayan Group This is the challenge for Skanska at the 1.4 ha Knightsbridge Estate on London’s wallet-emptying Brompton Road – a site bordered at one end by Harrods and on the other by Harvey Nichols. Take an elite retail-royalty asset, add a listed building on a constricted site and a dash of underlying tube line, and what have you got? An incentive to get it right first time, that’s what. Project: K1 development, Knightsbridge EstateĬontract type: two-stage tender design and build ![]()
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