The owner of PNC Center, an 18-story building at 120 S. Central Ave. in downtown Clayton, plan to convert space on the tower’s first floor to the amenities center. The new amenities will occupy about 11,000 square feet, said a spokesman for commercial real estate firm Sansone Group, which manages PNC Center for its owner, Clayton Central Owner LLC, an entity affiliated with California-based Forester Properties. Sansone Group is also a tenant in the building.
The plans call for a conference center with a training room seating up to 64 people, three four-person huddle rooms, an eight-person conference room, a 12-person conference room, a fitness center with locker rooms and showers, a yoga and Peloton room, a putting green, and pool table and a bar area with whiskey and wine lockers, Sansone Group said.
Development costs for the project were not disclosed. The building’s appraised value was $64.4 million as of January, according to county records.
“Maybe you can go down with a client and have a one-on-one meeting where there’s soft seating, or you can pop into a conference room,” said Sansone Group broker Nick Fiquette.
The amenities center will be built out in a former tenant space on the first floor, which will give everyone in the building easy access to the space, said Brandon Wappelhorst, broker with Sansone Group. The newly created amenities center will be near the lobby’s existing restaurant and coffee shop.
The lounge or bar area will have a variety of soft seating and is designed for companies to host events, with designated whiskey or wine lockers available, Wappelhorst said.
The fitness center at the PNC Center office building’s new amenities center, shown here in a rendering.
“It’s all going to be right off the building lobby. So there’s a lot of synergy there, and there will be a lot of energy that’s created,” Wappelhorst said. “We’ve put a lot of a lot of thought into this, and are trying to accommodate what tenants are desiring these days.”
The local architect for the project is Ken Domash of Domash DesignSource, Wappelhorst said. David Netto of Los Angeles-based David Netto Design is also working on the project.
The goal of the project is to appeal more to what tenants want to see in their office space, and Sansone brokers have seen an uptick in leasing activity in the last few months, since they started mentioning the planned amenities center to clients, Wappelhorst said. The building has signed two new tenants for a total of about 15,000 square feet, he said.
The largest tenants in the building as of May were law firm Carmody MacDonald, which expanded last year to 40,000 square feet over three floors; PNC Bank, with about 32,000 square feet; and Sansone Group, FTL Capital and law firm Sandberg Phoenix with about 16,000 square feet each, according to loan filings posted in May.
Occupancy is around 85%, Wappelhorst said. The building’s loan was refinanced earlier this year, and the building has “healthy ownership and is well capitalized,” he said.
Other buildings in Clayton are increasingly looking into adding amenities centers to compete for tenants that are seeking the highest-quality office space, especially now that the newest office buildings in Centene Plaza C and the Forsyth Pointe development are filling up. Shaw Park Plaza will be adding an outdoor patio area this fall to its new first-floor amenity center, and construction is underway at The Plaza building to create an amenities floor and a terrace as a common area. Other buildings such as the Hanley Corporate Center and the Pierre Laclede buildings also have added amenities.
