Ater Wynne has been headquartered in the KOIN Center tower at 222 SW Columbia St. since 1985, occupying the top three floors of office space in the 35-story building, which is topped with 16 floors of residential condominiums. Covering a full block bounded by Northwest 13th and 14th avenues and Lovejoy and Marshall streets, the Lovejoy is a 120,000-sf office and retail building designed to achieve LEED Silver certification from the US Green Building Council. Ater Wynn expects to make its move in December.
In making the move, Ater Wynne is decreasing its headquarters leasehold by about one-third. Company principal Jonathan Ater tells GlobeSt.com that a significant portion of the shrinkage is a result of the efficiency offered by the larger floor plate and open floor plan of the Lovejoy space. Another piece of it is a result of the flexibility it negotiated into its Lovejoy lease, which gives the law firm the right to expand onto a portion of the 8th floor and the right of first refusal on additional space in the building.
"We are in very traditional office space with a lot of private spaces that aren't the way people work anymore," Ater says. "With the Lovejoy's larger, more open floor plates, we can lay out a very different, very creative, much more efficient kind of workplace. It's not going to look like your Downtown law firm."
Located next to the city's streetcar line, the Lovejoy will be topped with a green roof and anchored by a 40,000-sf, two-story Safeway. In between the grocery store and the office space is four levels of parking, resulting in significant views for the office space. Other amenities include a garden terrace on the seventh floor, tall windows for natural daylight and bicycle parking. When the building is completed it will become a commercial condominium, Pearce says, with Ames and Solheim the first two floors and some of the parking and Unico will own some of the parking and the office space.
The Ater Wynne lease leaves two full floors of office space to be leased, or about 55,000 sf. The asking triple-net lease rate is $27 per sf per year. Operating expenses would add about $8.50 per sf per year to the occupancy cost. Unico's local executive Brian Pearce tells GlobeSt.com that lease currently under negotiation would fill another 15,000 sf of office space. Ater Wynn has the right of first refusal for additional office space in the building, says Pearce, who declined comment on the value of the lease.
Next to the Lovejoy Unico is developing a 16-story residential-over-retail building that will have 231 apartments above 20,000 sf of retail. Construction of the building is up to the 15th floor. Unico's multifamily executive Greg Van Patten tells GlobeSt.com the building will top out in mid-March, with early occupancy scheduled for September and final completion in December. The anchor retail tenant there is a 5,500-sf Bank of America branch that will face the main entrance to the Safeway. Apartment rents will be approximately $2.25 per sf.
"When we were planning the project in 2004, we'd tell colleagues we were doing this rental project and they were almost incredulous [because] the condo market was going gangbusters," Van Patten says. "But we could see all the apartment-to-condo conversions and the lack of new rental supply and the job growth and the increasing desirability of living in the city, particularly in the Pearl, and all those signs pointed to rental."
Buzz Ellis and Mark Friel of Pacific Real Estate Partners represented Unico in its lease negotiation with Ater Wynne. Craig Reinhart and Dave Reinhart of CRESA Partners represented Ater Wynne.
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