The Tontine Building is a historic (often listed) property situated within Glasgow's famous Merchant City area.
The local authority owned building comprises an entire block of Glasgow's classic criss-cross street matrix system, parts of which are sometimes used by Hollywood film makers to replicate US city scapes.
Stelmain, a longstanding property investment and developer client of MFMac, saw this particular site as an excellent opportunity to regenerate a B-listed landmark building into “a contemporary, innovative place of work”.
Stelmain have an excellent track record of regenerating Glasgow city centre buildings in recent years.
A key part of Stelmain's vision for the future of the Tontine building was to “rejuvenate the underutilised and largely vacant site through a combination of responsible demolition, strip-out, retrofit, extension, and fitting out — unifying the Tontine Building as an interconnected ensemble rather than a series of fragmented buildings”.
The proposed development scheme in this section of the city centre will provide not only new and refurbished office space - but complimentary uses for retail and hospitality and will help further revive this area of the Merchant City.
The redevelopment by Stelmain will involve using currently redundant space within the Tontine property extent - repurposing the sections of the building that have been left empty to date by creating café/bars as well as shops.
Key highlights
The acquisition of this asset was particularly complex from a legal and commercial perspective - involving third party owners and occupiers who had to be negotiated with to secure all the various rights required to allow Stelmain to facilitate the ultimate development scheme.
The redevelopment of the Tontine building will be a staged process, with the construction being procured in two phases - and the offices (once completed) will be capable of being let on a floor-by-floor basis.
MFMac's breadth and depth of expertise on complex mixed use development projects of this nature complimented Stelmain's vision and overall strategy for this scheme - to allow the initial acquisition of the asset to complete and move seamlessly forward into the redevelopment phase.
