90 High Holborn London WC1

SUMMARY
90 High Holborn is a new 182,000 sq ft air conditioned office building built in partnership with Minerva and our client Olswang for their own occupation.

HISTORY
Olswang, a leading firm of London solicitors, appointed Central Property Estates to act as its development adviser and monitoring surveyor for the construction of a completely new 182,000 sq ft office building. In addition, the company was appointed project manager to implement a fit out of 140,400 sq ft of the newly created space for its own use or subletting.

When Central Property Estates was appointed, Olswang had entered in to a joint venture with its major property client Minerva and the joint venture had purchased a site for the construction of a new building, a contractor for the new building had been selected and the site was being cleared.

Central Property Estates reviewed the specification of the new building and made recommendations that various changes should be made. These changes were agreed and incorporated into the design and the new building contract documentation was commented on and revised.

A consultant team for the fit out had been largely selected and those appointments were finalised and documented by Central Property Estates. During the construction of the new building the fit out design for Olswang, set in an initial brief, evolved through a series of workshops with the Steering Committee enabling each aspect of the fit out to be decided upon and signed off.

During this process the Central Property Estates brief was extended from just the building works to cover, in addition, the tendering and contract documentation for the furniture as well as the IT and physical move operation.

The completed scheme was divided into packages for tendering purposes covering the main fit out construction package, five furniture packages, four IT packages, a move consultant package and the removal contract itself. Each package was competitively tendered so that all the packages could be awarded on fixed price, time and performance contracts.

The fit out construction contractor was given rolling possession of the new building. It was intended that there would be a three month clear window after completion of the construction of the new building during which the fit out could be completed, furniture and IT installed and the systems tested. The fit out clear window became compressed and many activities that should have been consecutive became concurrent.

The move operation was compressed in to one weekend and Olswang started operating from their new offices on the date set 12 months earlier. A good result achieved through intensive management.