Refurbished offices can offer big carbon savings over the traditional approach of demolishing them and starting again
A stone’s throw from London’s affluent Sloane Square, a 1980s redbrick facade hides a fully revamped office building, partially built from reclaimed materials. The new features include larger, opening windows, higher ceilings and two “green walls” of living plants on the outside. The car park at the rear has given way to almost 80 cycle spaces, along with lockers and showers.
Holbein Gardens, which is nearly complete and will house up to 260 workers across six floors, is Grosvenor Group’s first net zero carbon office building in its 346-year history – and Grosvenor is keen to points out that it is net zero in operation, without relying on carbon offsets. The Duke of Westminster’s property company, which owns swaths of London’s most exclusive neighbourhoods in Mayfair and Belgravia, decided to redevelop the mid-1980s concrete-frame building and add another storey – the latest example of the nascent “retrofit” boom.
