Fashion Publisher of Vogue and Tatler Is Taking Space to 75,000 Square Feet at Adelphi Building

Spanish investment giant Pontegadea has secured fashion bible publisher Condé Nast for 75,000 square feet of offices, a near doubling of its space, at the Adelphi Building in Covent Garden.

Condé Nast is the owner of upmarket fashion magazines including Vogue, Glamour and Tatler.

Blackstone completed the sale of the 327,000-square-foot Adelphi building to Zara founder Amancio Ortega’s Pontegadea for around £550 million, a 4.4% net initial yield, in 2017.

Condé Nast first moved into 41,000 square feet on the basement and eighth and ninth floor, relocating from its long-term home at Vogue House in Mayfair, in 2018.

RX London advised Pontegadea and Knight Frank advised Condé Nast on the latest letting.

Mark Stansfield, UK head of analytics at CoStar, said leasing activity has rebounded in recent quarters as employees have returned to offices in greater numbers.

He says Covent Garden has been a hive of activity at the smaller, sub-5,000 square feet end of the market.

“The likes of Brightcove, Orveon Global and Auto Trader have each taken around 5,000 square feet in Covent Garden in recent months, while IK Investments and PGIM have taken circa 15,000 square feet spaces on the Strand. Encouragingly for landlords, firms from a variety of industries are still taking space here in a continuation of the pre-pandemic trend.”

Stansfield adds that larger deals are also coming back after a quiet few years.

“Pharmaceuticals firm GSK signed Covent Garden’s largest letting in nine years in December 2022 when it preleased 161,000 square feet at Royal London Asset Management’s Earnshaw building on New Oxford Street for its new global headquarters. The company will move in 2024 from Brentford. This was one of several big deals late last year as Covent Garden ended 2022 on a high.”

Conde Nast’s letting fits in with a trend of firms that have moved east to Covent Garden from more expensive or supply-constrained submarkets in the West End, a consistent theme in recent years thatshows little sign of slowing down.

“Many new tenants at the Adelphi, a refurbished 327,000-square-foot building close to the River Thames, have moved from West End submarkets: Spotify from Soho, Conde Nast from Mayfair, the Economist Group from St James’s and PetroChina International from Victoria.”