Amazon’s Makeover of Lord & Taylor Building Shows Challenge of Office Conversions

livemint.com:

Amazon.com on Tuesday will unveil its new Manhattan office at the former Lord & Taylor flagship department store, a transformation that highlights how complex office conversions can be. Turning a Fifth Avenue department store that is more than a century old into a modern office came with plenty of challenges. Amazon had to add bathrooms, kitchens, new elevators and stairs wide enough for a rush of office workers.

And then there is the lack of daylight. Floors span around 55,000 square feet on average, meaning large parts of the building are far away from windows. So the company decided to build a staircase with plants and daylight-mimicking lamps, giving the illusion of a courtyard.

Big floors such as those at the Lord & Taylor building are emerging as a large hurdle to clear as companies and investors look to convert more aging office and retail buildings in America’s downtowns. Some developers are cutting courtyards into buildings to add windows, but doing that at the Lord & Taylor Building would have cost too much valuable office space, said Kyle Elliott, design partner at architecture firm WRNS Studio, which designed the conversion. The staircase offered an alternative.

WRNS also packed the interior with meeting rooms, which don’t need windows as badly, and added two new floors on top of the roof. Amazon bought the building for $978 billion from WeWork in March 2020. It began construction about two years later.

Around 2,000 employees—a fifth of Amazon’s New York-area workforce—are assigned to the building, which opened its doors in July, said vice president of global real estate and facilities John Schoettler. The building has more than 600,000 square feet. Amazon earlier this year ordered employees back to the