Grand Conversions: Developers Eye Up Unused Offices for Residential Refits

On a busy high street in Balham, south London, stands a boxy, beige-fronted building. Built in the 1940s, for decades the four-storey office block was home to hundreds of civil servants until the Department for Work and Pensions officials left in 2020.

- Julia Kollewe

Now, Irene House boasts 77 one- and two-bedroom upmarket flats with seven more homes inside a roof extension. It still has its art deco entrance and other features inspired by the building's original interior, and represents a growing trend: to convert office blocks into homes. The project may appear an example of how to solve the housing crisis, in a post-pandemic era when increased working from home has made offices less appealing and demand for accommodation remains high, but the reality is more complicated.

There has been a surge in applications for office-toresidential conversions since the lifting of an office space limit last March. However, architects say they can be daunting and costly with challenges around deep floorplates and lack of natural light.

The ultimate office conversion is the transformation of the opulent Old War Office in Whitehall, Winston Churchill's base during the second world war, into a 120-room Raffles hotel and 85 luxury flats in a £1.2bn project - albeit without any affordable housing.

Centre Point, the landmark 1960s office tower in central London, was also revamped as luxury housing in 2018, with 13 socially rented flats in a separate low-rise block.

In Chiswick, an 11-storey office tower known as Empire House has just been converted into 121 homes starting at £625,000, despite local opposition.