Some €4 million is being spent making a former bank building into one of the larger shops on Dublin's premier shopping street, writes Jack Fagan.
IRISH LIFE Investment Managers (ILIM) is seeking a rent of €1 million for a former bank building near the bottom of Dublin's Grafton Street which is being remodelled and extended in the expectation that it will attract a top international fashion retailer.
ILIM is spending around €4 million on making the once forbidding building at 114 Grafton Street more accessible to shoppers.
Although the façade is listed for preservation, the planners have allowed two front windows to be dropped down to street level so that they can be used as glazed doors.
The existing entrance door is to be replaced with a glass display window.
Even more noticeably, customers will no longer have to walk up steps to the entrance hall.
The floor has been dropped to street level and two escalators have been installed, one to take shoppers to a new mezzanine level and the other to service a retail area at first floor level.
The new arrangement will allow the overall retail space to be extended to 460sq m (almost 5,000sq ft) in a street where large floor plates are notoriously scarce.
The new tenant will also have the use of extensive storage space in the basement as well as on two upper levels.
Michael Harrington of letting agent HWBC describes it as "a major plus for the street to have taken out dead frontage and replaced it with a top retail facility".
The planners, he said, had shown the same enlightened foresight in allowing the façade of the former AIB bank near the top of Grafton Street to be altered to make it more customer-friendly for Monsoon.
Mervyn Ellis of HWBC describes number 114 Grafton Street as a "truly spectacular building on Ireland's premier retail street".
He says he has already had considerable interest in the premises which "offers a unique opportunity to trade in one of the most decorated and eye-catching buildings on the street".
Irish Life's decision to buy back the lease of the Grafton Street building marked the end of an embarrassing episode by the EBS building society in acquiring the lease in 2003 and never occupying the premises.
The society paid €500,000 for the lease after selling its nearby head office in Westmoreland Street.
The lengthy saga is likely to have cost the society around €2 million and, even worse, it is still lumbered with the adjoining Spar shop which was sublet and several overhead floors of offices which have been vacant for some time.
The EBS moved its head office to Burlington Road in Ballsbridge and, though it still maintains a front office at Upper Liffey Street, the society has never clarified why it choose that location rather than the infinitely better office it originally leased on Andrew Street, just a few doors off Wicklow Street.
