Barcelona has a new office building, commercial premises, and restaurant this week, located in one of the most coveted areas of the city, the stretch of Avenida Diagonal that touches Francesc Macià square. This is Aura, the real estate project that has completely transformed the old El Corte Inglés center to turn it into a new icon destined to house high-value companies that have talent acquisition and retention as their top priority.
The developer and owner of Aura, located at number 471 of Diagonal, is AM Gestió, the family office of businessman Pedro Alonso Agüera, former owner of the automotive components company Infun. This company bought the El Corte Inglés center in Francesc Macià in mid-2019 for 152 million euros. Now, it has invested 40 million in its comprehensive remodeling, so the total outlay for the project is close to 200 million. Alonso, who has a patrimonialist vocation, plans to recover this amount through the long-term rents generated by the rental of the 21,500 m² of available space.
Of this figure, 14,100 m² correspond to offices ---each floor has 3,000 m² for rent--- and another 6,178 m² are distributed among two commercial premises with a facade on Diagonal and three premises intended to house catering establishments in the back, at the confluence of Buenos Aires street with Villarroel. Once the works are finished, the owner of Aura has commissioned the real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield to exclusively market the property, for which multiple companies have already shown interest, according to Natalia Tost, partner in the office area of Cushman.
For now, the basement floor and one of the three ground-floor restaurant premises have been rented to El Corte Inglés, which between May and June will open a supermarket, a tasting and gastronomic experiences area, and a Gourmet Club that will occupy an area of more than 3,200 square meters. Thus, residents of the area will once again have an El Corte Inglés supermarket available, one of the losses they felt most when the department stores definitively closed their doors in January 2021.
Although not officially confirmed, one of the two commercial premises on Diagonal has also been rented to the perfumery chain Sephora, which has already begun adaptation works to open at the end of April. The other available store, of 800 m², also already has a suitor and the rental contract, according to Domènec Casellas, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, will be signed in a matter of weeks. The identity of the brand interested in opening this flagship has not been revealed. In parallel, there are conversations with multiple companies interested in opening restaurants and cafeterias in the two ground-floor premises facing Buenos Aires, which can, in turn, be segmented into smaller spaces, allowing for an increase in the diversity of the dining offer.
The Aura project is signed by the Blanch + Conca Arquitectura (BCA) firm and has been built over fifteen months by a temporary union of companies comprising Serom (a subsidiary of the Calaf group) and Elecnor. According to architect Albert Blanc, only the structure of the original building, built in 1967 by the American Sears, has been maintained, and the rest is all new, which allows the building to have the latest technologies, boast the highest environmental, health and well-being, and connectivity certifications (Leed, Well and WiredScore Platinum) and adapt to the ESG criteria currently sought by all major companies. Initially, in 2019, the works were budgeted at 25 million euros, but in the end, they have cost 40 million due to the consequences of successive crises (pandemic, war in Ukraine, inflation, scarcity of materials...) that have occurred since then.
Of the five floors dedicated to offices, the open-plan spaces and the great luminosity they enjoy stand out, as it is a fully glazed building on all four sides. In addition, the floors are crossed by an interior atrium that also provides natural light and has been built taking advantage of the enormous void occupied by the escalators of the old shopping center. This atrium is equipped with a vertical garden where green leaves contrast with the white color that prevails on the facade and inside the property.
Another significant element that makes the building unique in this area of Barcelona is that it has a rooftop on the sixth floor, a 1,400 m² rooftop, which can be used for informal meetings or as a space for disconnection and socialization by the 1,800 people who can work in Aura. In addition, on the first floor there is another 1,000 m² terrace, facing the Godó Tower and where flowerbeds have been installed with a type of substrate that allows plants to generate bioelectricity. This is a project led by the startup Bioo, which seeks to create "biotechnological cities". Finally, Aura has an auditorium and three floors of underground parking, with a specific space for electric cars, bicycles and scooters.
Natalia Tost highlights the unique characteristics of the building, both for its privileged location ---between Eixample, Les Corts and Sant Gervasi--- and for having open-plan floors of 3,000 m² impossible to find in this prime area of the city, defined in real estate jargon as CBD (Central Business District). "In this business hub there is no other building like it; to find these surfaces we would have to go to 22@ or the Zona Franca," explains the expert, who also emphasizes the importance of having a large terrace in the city center, an element that in this post-pandemic environment companies looking for offices have turned into an indispensable requirement. "The terrace is now a key element in commercialization," she states.
Tost hopes to announce the first tenants of Aura's offices over the next three months. Although she has not advanced the amount of the rents that will be negotiated, she emphasizes that the building has the vocation to "break the glass ceiling" that currently exists in Barcelona in terms of prices. In her opinion, in this property the price issue becomes secondary, since what prevails "is the value of talent" that is sought to be attracted or retained from this privileged location in the heart of the city. "Whoever settles in Aura will do so thinking about their teams, about their talent," she assures. According to Tost, they are already in conversations with international companies that are sensitive in this matter.
Aura offers maximum versatility to tenants, so it can be rented entirely by a single company or by several. Thus, each typical floor of 3,000 m² can be occupied by a single company or by two, since it segments into a 2,000 m² module in the entire area facing Villarroel and Buenos Aires streets, and a 1,000 m² module in the part with views of Diagonal and Francesc Maciá.
Finally, the partner of Cushman & Wakefield also emphasizes that Aura was born "with the purpose of acting as a positive transforming agent for the entire neighborhood," in the sense that the entire renovation has been conceived to promote maximum integration into the urban fabric and to promote a safe environment. A tangible element is that the sidewalks of Villarroel and Buenos Aires will now be much wider.