Picture caption: The Old War Office, which is now home to the UK’s first Raffles Hotel and 85 luxury apartments
With larger organisations ordering their employees back to the office, it might seem like the tide is turning on home working. But there are still a large number of empty offices, and converting them into homes could be a sensible response to the housing crisis.
The relaxation of planning rules in 2024 has contributed to the trend in converting office space into living accommodation. Over the past few years, there have been some interesting examples of this trend.
The Old War Office in Whitehall, London, has been converted into a hotel and luxury apartments. Centre Point is now luxury housing, with 13 socially rented flats in a separate block. And the Art Deco building, Irene House in Balham, which housed the Department of Work and Pensions, is now home to 84 new abodes.
As you may already know, the two key restrictions removed in the amendments to permitted development rights from 5th March 2024 are:
1. The removal of the size limit of 1,500 square metres, meaning that larger office buildings can be considered for conversion, and
2. The removal of the need for a property to be vacant for three months, speeding up the process for developers.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that converting larger buildings will become easier. Deep floor plates and difficulties related to natural light and ventilation mean that these kinds of conversions are still a challenge.
Around 9% of offices across London remain empty, as demand for office space has not fully recovered after the pandemic. When possible, workers now tend to split their time between home and the office, and we’re unlikely to see a full-scale, five-day-week return to the office in many sectors.
A lot of the capital’s vacant offices are older, lower-quality buildings, with the newest offices seeing high occupancy rates. So it is these older buildings that are ripe for conversion. This is more straightforward when it comes to the West End townhouses which became offices, and low-rise mid-century office blocks. More challenging to convert are the office towers, especially those with only one stairwell.
In the past, office conversions have led to the creation of dark, cramped living spaces, so these homes are now required to have natural light and minimum space standards. It’s depressing that these standards had to be enforced (back in April 2021) but it’s clearly the only way to ensure less scrupulous developers aren’t cramming people into inhumane living conditions.
You are still very limited by the existing main structure of a building, so it may be that for many offices, a retrofit to create hotels or even laboratories is a more sensible use of unoccupied offices.
These use cases would be my preference, and I certainly wouldn’t be queuing up to live in a former office block. What do you think? Are these conversions a faster way to create the homes we need in the UK, or are we simply creating either luxury apartments or dingy flats – neither of which solves our housing crisis?
Meanwhile, if you need any assistance with the structural elements of an upcoming project, please do get in touch.
