Davis Langdon were heavily involved in the Agreement for Lease negotiations and took the lead role in driving the developer to produce a comprehensive base building specification and for identifying shortcomings in the original proposal.

This led to the developer being required to incorporate changes to the proposals which significantly enhanced the building to the Tenant’s advantage.

Floor Area: 170,000 sq ft (nett)
Cost: £17.0m (including furniture)
Form of Contract: TBA
Contract Period: TBA
Occupation: July 2005

Originally the brief was to fit-out seven floors of new office accommodation from shell and core. The Base Building is now constructed and our client has (having procured a full Category B installation) decided not to occupy the building and is fitting it out to a Category A standard.

Largely the project was a success, however a major lesson learned from K2 was that in the present market, the Tenant has considerable opportunity to enhance the base building requirements at the developer’s cost since developers are more concerned to maintain headline rents than with initial capital spend.

In addition, K2 is also an object lesson in carefully thinking through accommodation requirements at an early stage since this particular building proved to be very constrained in terms of where additional drainage could be located for kitchens and showers and how the additional supply and extract ductwork associated with stand-alone plant for the kitchen / café provision could be routed through the building.

Finally, K2 has marked a fairly major shift in our thinking on audio visual systems in that the Client started with quite limited aspirations but has been slowly convinced, not only by specialist consultants, but also by his own staff that it needs to make a fundamental shift in its approach to AV within its meeting rooms (both for external client and internal usage), video conferencing and presentation / training.

This has led to a fourfold increase in the original budget for the AV and has certainly made us aware of the need to closely interrogate this issue at an early stage rather than rely upon the Client’s initial statement that they would simply replicate what they had in their existing accommodation.