Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa May 2016 | Page 44

IMPROVING

Repurposing Commercial Real Estate
Maximise Rental Income through Renovation
BY LEON SAVEN

O

n my return to Cape Town in 2003, I was
fortunate to hook up with four clients, each
with a building in the Woodstock area, about
to develop their respective projects, and each with
their own brief.
The first, an old industrial clothing factory,
called Fairweather House, had seen the demise of
the clothing industry in the nineties and had been
standing virtually empty for some 20 years. This
building, much like many old industrial buildings
in the neighbourhood, was about to become one
of the first redevelopments of today’s burgeoning
Woodstock nu-wave culture.
An examination of the building found us on the top
floor, with its factory south lights, mountain facing, in
a space of around 200m2. The large volume, sawtooth,
combination bow-tie open roofscape, was literally
filled to the rafters with pigeons, effectively become
a 5 star aviary. It didn’t take long before I got busy
with sketch plans, to outline the conversion of these
spaces into loft style, live and work spaces. For the
building to work, it would be vital to create parking.
After studying the structural layout of the building
we found that within the grid of columns supporting
this building, we could achieve an extremely efficient
parking layout, with almost 100 bays, and unlock
the potential of this building. Sacrificing one floor

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MAY 2016 SA Real Estate Investor

of the building, with a single entrance and exit at
the rear of the building, and the ratio of parking to
habitable space, meant that it would be feasible to
create and rent, A-grade commercial space, with
parking for tenants and visitors. The aviary was
about to make way for the new Goodman Gallery of
Cape Town! Since then the building has been filled
with prestigious galleries, fabric houses, architects,
designers, furniture showrooms, and a host of other
interesting and exciting enterprises; besides The
Goodman Gallery, South Gallery, Chair Crazy, St.
Leger and Viney, Bos Tea, just to mention a few.
The design approach to this project, was to follow
an authentic and rudimentary set of principles,
by recognizing the building, for its strength and
distinctive features. These were to be exposed literally
and celebrated. For example, all the concrete columns
of the building were sandblasted. This provided an
inexpensive, effective and beautiful texture, which
exposed the old beach sand with sea shells, used in the
original concrete mix during construction. I suppose
the beach sand would have been taken, from the
Woodstock beach, just down the road, at the time. The
old Oregon roof trusses were also sandblasted and left
raw, with its magnificent texture and umber showing.
The old brick walls were also stripped of their plaster
and paint, revealing the original industrial building
www.reimag.co.za