Esprit, Lambton Quay, Wellington
The Esprit building is a light, airy and inviting two-storey building facing onto the prime retail space of Wellington’s Lambton Quay.
It came about as part of the restructuring of the ownership of the ANZ Building and was an opportunity for our client. If he could obtain consent to extend the retail, he would have a major ‘prize’. He had the passion to make it happen.
The building itself was not a complicated structure. The major challenge for us was simply the process of getting it built. It’s
on the corner of Grey Street and Lambton Quay. Grey Street is a small tight cul-de-sac and Lambton Quay is, from the Council’s point-of-view, sacrosanct. Contractors were forbidden to load or unload off Lambton Quay. Even the smallest of tasks became obstacles.
To get a geotechnical report we had to resort to lifting pavement after hours, doing the drilling, and then making sure that it was perfectly reinstated before shops opened in the morning. Another complicating factor – and motivation – was to have the project completed by November. Logical, given that the Christmas period would be, for our client, a ‘not miss’ time to launch a new shop. But as well as that it was also a Council requirement that all street works had to be completed by this time. If they weren’t, work would not be able to resume until the New Year, an accumulating cost that the project could not bear.
The building was completed on time and to plan. Designed to accommodate single or multiple tenancy, it has been tenanted in full by Esprit, the first Esprit concept shop to be developed in Wellington.