hen executives at Malkin Holdings W&H Properties chose to reposition the Empire State Building and several other

assets prior to the downturn, few expected that 250 West 57th Street, a building chock-a-block with 150-square-foot offices, would experience such a rapid transformation. But sure enough, less than five years after those ambitious renovations began, the building welcomed its first fullfloor tenant in three decades, thanks to a leasing deal with Perseus Books Group in February. Seeking to consolidate two offices in New York City, the publishing group took the 26,104-square-foot 15th floor earlier this year and expects to consolidate and expand over the next few weeks. Anthony Malkin, president of Malkin Holdings, reviewed the furniture plan and the Mufson Partnership architectural designs with The Commercial Observer and discussed why, exactly, Perseus chose 250 West 57th Street.
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Prior to a gut renovation, the buildings 15th floor housed an estimated 20 tenants, each with their own labyrinthine space. Besides a lack of windows for many of the interior offices, the layout forced the building owner to create long hallways throughout the floorplate to ensure universal access to the buildings fire exits. The issue was that you had to run a corridor down the middle of the floor if you were going to tenant the floorliterally something had to go east-west across the entire floor, said Mr. Malkin. So when you go and gut the entire floor for one tenant, you suddenly unlock all this usable space, which was previously wasted by all these corridors.

THE PLAN

250 west 57th street

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Contrary to many traditional floor plans, officials at Perseus chose to situate workstations across the perimeter of the office space and lightobscuring private offices at the center. The result, said Mr. Malkin, was a plan that took advantage of natural light coming through every side of the building. By reversing the order, and putting the offices on the inside and the cubicles on the outside, you create a much better sharing of light and air, said Mr. Malkin. Natural light, while conceivably important to any office worker, was even more important to the editors and prolific readers at Perseus, where scanning tiny type in dim rooms can be an occupational hazard. With that in mind, the publisher and its architect created a dropped-ceiling plan and high ceilings in order to reduce over-illumination from artificial light. This is a publishing business, so the folks are probably sitting and reading galleys, and theyre also probably editing, so the whole concept of natural light is huge, said Mr. Malkin. And typically your office spaces are overilluminated. They have too much overhead light. So they decided on higher ceilings to reduce the amount of lighting intensity.

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While common across all business sectors, conference rooms were key for Perseus, where collaboration is crucial. As such, the publisher devised a space at the center of the new office with the ability to comfortably house much of the companys staff, but also a place for other meetings. They wanted a collaborative environment, said Mr. Malkin. And by the way, this isnt just a publishing firmits an online publishing firm. This is like a thriving future business. One of the motives behind the renovations at 250 West 57th Street was to create space more alluring to large corporate tenants than, say, smaller businesses only willing to take 200 square feet or less. Even after we had done a lot of the vacating, we figured it would be a multi-tenanted flooronly we were gonna have five or six offices on it instead of, like, 20, said Mr. Malkin.

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Shortly after gutting the floor, Mr. Malkin saw, firsthand, the large number of columns speckled across the building, many of them peppering the center of the floor plate. With a good design strategy, however, those columns quickly disappeared as an obstacle. The fact is, people look at these buildings and they say, well, you cant use this, you cant build densely, you cant install denselyits got too many columns, said Mr. Malkin. But if you look at this, its actually an incredibly efficient layout.

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30|July 24, 2012|The Commercial Observer