THERE is nothing like a new landmark building to create a buzz about town. In Birmingham, the talk is of The Cube, a striking 23-storey building by Ken Shuttleworth, the architect behind the Swiss Re building (better known to Londoners as the Gherkin) as well as the City Hall, home to the Greater London Authority.

Having changed the capital’s skyline on both banks of the Thames, Shuttleworth will perform a similar trick in Birmingham’s city centre on a site by a canal at the foot of the Mailbox. The latter is a massive shopping centre and the Brummie answer to Bond Street, which opened six years ago as part of the city’s ongoing facelift.

Shuttleworth’s design evokes a gold jewellery box, echoing Birmingham’s link with precious stones (it still has the highest concentration of jewellers in Europe). The building will sit above a white transparent base as if levitating over the city. The outside will be a shimmering, golden, jigsaw-like framework; inside there will be an open courtyard where pedestrians can stroll between shops. Although largely residential, the building’s heart will act as a hub for pedestrians between the canal and the streets.

It will be the most expensive development per square foot in the city. When the project is finished, there will be nine floors of apartments, five floors of offices, four floors of shops and offices, three floors of parking, one floor a hotel, and a top floor housing a restaurant and glamorous sky bar.

Building work has not yet started, so there isn’t a show flat — that will be built in September, when the second phase of selling starts. The first phase has sold quickly: 138 out of a possible 242 units have gone in two months. Prices for the second phase have not been decided, but rough figures are £140,000 for a studio flat, £200,000 for a two-bed flat and

£310,000 for a two-bed one. By comparison, the second most expensive development per square foot in Birmingham is the Rotunda, Urban Splash’s offering, where a studio of a similar size costs about £10,000 less. Building work for the Cube will be finished in 2009.

The developer, the Birmingham Development Company (BDC), is also behind the hugely successful Mailbox development — a converted postal sorting office — now home to shops such as Harvey Nichols, Armani and Bang & Olufsen; the Malmaison Hotel and the offices of BBC Birmingham are also there. In addition, various cosmopolitan canalside restaurants and bars are just outside the Mailbox.

For anyone who has not visited Birmingham in the past decade, it is worth pointing out that the city — as with most places in the UK — is much wealthier than it used to be. Perhaps as a result, it is a city that takes its shopping very seriously. The Bullring — home to the fabulously weird Selfridges building, which locals have nicknamed The Blue Whale — is the biggest city-centre shopping centre in Europe. It is expected that the luxury brands that have flocked to the Mailbox will follow suit with The Cube. Moreover, BDC is in discussion with an unnamed celebrity chef about taking over the restaurant on the top floor.

These days planning restrictions make it effectively impossible for developers to contruct large schemes without putting in shops and services as well. But The Cube project takes the mix of residential and commercial property to a new level. “People talk about mixed use, but normally it turns out to be 300 apartments above three shops,” says Alan Chatham, of BDC. “But we designed The Cube so that you have everything you want within the building. You could never leave, if you so wanted.”

There are real concerns, though: apartments are going up at a rate of 1,000 a year in Birmingham and you do not have to be a genius to work out that construction cannot continue at this rate for much longer without serious problems for the local property market.

That said, Liam Bailey, head of residential research at Knight Frank, believes that there is enough employment and population growth to absorb the stock, for the moment at least. He adds that the market in Birmingham “is as healthy as it has been in the past few years”. And buying into a landmark building may well be a good way of immunising yourself against a market that has the potential to become over-saturated in the future.

This is a truly home-grown project. The key people involved in The Cube are all Brummies — Shuttleworth was born and bred in Birmingham, as were the developers. People who care deeply about their home city have created this building, full of civic pride and ambition, and a rather dull part of town has been turned into a veritable gem.
Knight Frank: 0121-200 2220
www.mailboxlife.com www.thecubeiscoming.com

CITY SNIPPETS

A fifth of all Brummies claim to have met Bill Clinton when he attended the G8 summit in Birmingham in 1998.

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