Sir Terence Conran, clad in one of his trademark blue shirts and puffing on an
equally trademark Cuban cigar, is talking about loft living. We’re in the
vast top-floor office-cum-living room of his Michael Hopkins-designed
Bermondsey HQ, a few steps from his beloved Design Museum and handy for his
“Gastrodome” of restaurants lining the river towards Tower Bridge. But he’s
not talking about London. He’s talking about Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool,
Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield. Because one of Conran’s many business
ventures is architecture and design. And he has a joint venture going with
one of the key developers in this area, City Lofts.
“People are now living and working in cities, so they bring a new vibrancy to
the centres,” says Conran. “I can remember when Manchester used to be
completely deserted at night. Now there’s a buzz, so the place operates
seven days and seven nights a week, rather than just five days from nine to
five.”
We’re not alone. Conran is flanked by Richard Doone, the perennially youthful
managing director of architects and designers Conran & Partners, and his
long-term client Stuart Wright, financier and head of the City Lofts Group.
Never heard of City Lofts? It’s true it doesn’t have the instant customer
recognition of a regional brand such as Urban Splash, or a London-focused
company such as Manhattan Lofts. But from a small start in Leeds in 1998,
the group has grown to the point where it is building big apartment schemes
in all the key regional cities. It has £183m of new building going on, and
is on course to triple that shortly to £460m. That’s about 2,550 apartments,
all designed to a greater or lesser extent by Conran’s team. And not just
designed, of course. Branded.
“I’m slightly embarrassed that we’re a brand name — on the other hand, that
means we have to work that much harder to make sure we don’t damage our
brand,” remarks Conran. “When we did a scheme in Brighton, it was said that
because the Conran name was attached to it, the apartments were actually
selling for a considerably higher figure than the norm.” Wright does not
demur — though he says that for him it’s more important that people actually
want to live in his buildings. Either way, it’s good for business. Which is
why City Lofts has now got Conran on a 10-year deal.
“We collaborated on a lot of schemes, and the relationship got established,”
says Wright. “We like working together. What we wanted to do, and what the
Conran group could bring to us, and us to them, meant that it was a very
good marriage. So we formalised the arrangement with a licensing agreement
in 2003.” That year, incidentally, is the year that City Lofts floated on
the Alternative Investment Market, so giving it the scope to finance the
much larger projects it is now tackling.
“There is an awful lot of city-centre development going on, and a lot of it is
not particularly good — in terms of design, aesthetics, and quality of
internal specification,” says Wright. “The vast majority of it is average,
and that’s being kind.”
Given that “lofts” don’t mean huge ex-industrial spaces on the New York model
any more — the word has lost all meaning, in fact, being just a synonym for
“flat” — what is the City Lofts/Conran difference? For Wright, the
financier, that’s a simple business proposition. “We try to make our
buildings the market leaders in their particular location, in terms of where
they are, what they are, how they’re designed, and the quality of their
interiors.” For Conran, it’s a more intuitive affair, a matter of bringing a
particular attitude to urban living. An attitude that, indefatigable
traveller as he is, contains influences from cities all over the world. He’s
always calling home to tell the team about things he has seen.
One of the things that bugs me about all these city-centre apartment
developments is that they are geared to investors, who snap up flats by the
score, even by the hundred, off-plan. Flats can be sold on several times
before they are even built, and then they are mostly kept for the eventual
rental income. So who is it that eventually gets to live in them? “The
market is at an interesting point at the moment,” says Wright. “Occupational
demand in the city centres is driven largely by young professionals in their
mid-twenties to mid-thirties. A lot of those people are leaving university
with student loans, so they can’t afford to buy as early as they would
otherwise have done. It’s not like my generation, which left college with a
£200 overdraft having drunk too much beer, and that was about it. So as an
inevitable consequence of student debt, there’s a larger proportion of
people wanting to rent in city centres.”
Conran chips in: “It’s also partially to do with the fact that people don’t
expect to have a job for life. That’s a very different thing from when I was
young. People know they are going to move around, and therefore they don’t
want to put roots down as early as we did in my generation. And there was
this extraordinary statistic produced recently about people wanting to live
by themselves — entirely on their own. They don’t want to share, have wives,
partners, anything.”
But they do eventually put down those roots: after living their no-ties life
for a few years, says Wright, there is evidence that tenants are now
starting to buy their apartments. In the financial sector, the return of the
annual bonus is stimulating a new breed of owner-occupier. Older folk
downsizing from their big and valuable suburban homes are also getting to be
an important factor. The rest of us have to scrimp and save, club together
with friends, whatever. And if you start a family, of course, you are into
another sector of the market, and that’s a problem. Because almost none of
these mushrooming city-centre developments is aimed at families.
“There aren’t many families living in these developments, and that’s a
cultural issue,” says Doone. “People live in a city-centre apartment until
they decide to have a family, and then they decide to move out.” Wright
agrees. “What needs to be done in the cities now is a second level of
infrastructure — primary schools especially. Then you need an element of
open space within the buildings so you can go for a walk, take the children
out into a garden, give them something to do. I think that will come.”
“What worries me,” says Conran, “is that you’ve lived in this pleasantly
designed modern environment in a city centre: then you get married, you have
children, and you can’t find anything suitable. It’s really sad. We’re
working on that. Maybe what we — City Lofts and others — are doing in city
centres will eventually be the spur to get the bloody housebuilders to do
something decent. There’s plenty of thinking about it — but not much doing.”
In the meantime, City Lofts continues to pump out its apartments to the old
financial formula — investor flats, in city centres, in ever-larger blocks.
St Paul’s in Sheffield, for instance, with a development value of £60m, and
one-bed flats selling from £110,000 and two-beds from £160,000, has both a
nine-storey and a 31-storey tower. It will have 322 of the usual lettable
apartments and lots of ground-level retail space for shops and restaurants.
Work starts this year. The other flagship schemes — Admiral House in Cardiff,
Salford Quays near the Lowry cultural centre in Manchester, Princes Dock in
Liverpool, Quayside Lofts in Newcastle, Robert’s Wharf in Leeds — come in
various shapes but are planned to the same formula. No sign yet, then, of a
new breed of child-friendly, family-oriented urban living. Prices are pretty
standard, too: £140,000 for one-bed flats and £210,000 for two-beds at
Cardiff ’s Admiral House; at Salford Quays, one-beds are £158,000, and
two-beds start at £204,000.
The Conran touch is very apparent in the interiors — these are tall-ceilinged
places that make maximum use of space. Bedrooms can be opened up to living
rooms to give more elbowroom for people working from home. They are made of
durable materials, such as travertine marble for the bathrooms. They come
with optional Conran-supplied furniture packages tailored for the buy-to-let
market. With his pedigree in home furnishings, you would expect something
decent of the interiors, and so it proves. When it comes to the external
architecture, however, things aren’t so good.
Let’s be frank: these blocks are, at best, undistinguished from the outside.
Whatever else Conran & Partners is known for, it is not ambitious or
even unusual architecture. Their buildings are relatively well-mannered,
occasionally a touch crude in the details, as discreet as their bulk allows,
but they attempt nothing very imaginative or exceptional, as some rivals do.
And that, I suspect, is exactly the way the financial backers of these
projects like it. What they want is familiarity and certainty. Why knock it?
Back in the old days, that was what we all wanted from Conran’s Habitat. Now
he’s not just supplying homes — he’s helping design them as well. I just
wish they had a bit more pizzazz.
City Lofts, 01423 506 262, www.citylofts.co.uk
