Jervis Centre tunes up for the sound of opening doors

THE newly licensed radio station, Radio Ireland, is likely to be based at the Jervis Centre, the £50 million shopping complex which to open at Mary Street, Dublin, on November 1st.

Executives of the independent radio service are in discussions about leasing 11,000 square feet of space in four restored Georgian buildings fronting on to Upper Abbey Street. The rent is expected to be about £14 per square foot.

If the deal goes ahead, it will be yet another coup for the centre which has attracted a strong line up of tenants - many of them UK multiples coming to Ireland for the first time.

More than £1 million has been spent on refurbishing the four Georgian buildings, which back on to the centre. Two of them were originally merchant buildings. The other two dating from 1760 have been rebuilt at the behest of conservationists, though the ground floor of one of them has been removed to make way for an entrance to the delivery yard.

Virtually all 330,000 square feet of retail space in the centre has already been booked and about 80 per cent of the units will be fitted out in time for the opening next week.

The 1.1 million-square-foot development might never have been embarked upon but for the Government's decision to designate the site for tax purposes. UK property group Trafalgar House spent about £8 million on assembling and holding the three-acre site. Trafalgar sold it on to the current owners for £4.5 million just as the commercial property market was turning after several years of recession. The promoters lost no time in re-designing the scheme and succeeded in having the entire project completed within an extremely tight 15 months time-frame. The fact that the main contractors, Pierse, was able to meet the deadline is all the more remarkable because of the immense difficulties of developing a site of this size in a busy city centre location.

The new centre is larger than the two main shopping centres in the city - the ILAC and the St Stephen's Green complex. It also has a better mix of tenants.

The main access on Mary Street will feature a 50-foot-high glazed entrance opening into a broad, double-height mall. Part of the Victorian redbrick facade of the old Todd Burns store has been retained along Mary Street where it is now supported by Portland Stone and Irish granite. An equally attractive entrance at the junction of Jervis Street and Abbey Street will cater for passengers using the new light rail service, Luas.

The centrepiece of the development is a 60-foot-high central rotunda from which shoppers will have clear views of the shops on the two main levels. The central area will have lifts serving the other shopping floors and also the 750-space car-park on the upper floors. There will also be a travelator linked to the basement where Quinnsworth will have almost an acre of space for a new-style food hall.

Traders are spending an estimated £50 million on fitting out their new units, virtually the same as it cost to build the centre. With almost one-third of the space going to the main anchor, Debenhams, the UK multiple has committed more than £15 million on the fit out of what will be its first store in the Republic. Debenhams, along with Next, will also front on to Mary Street.

Marks & Spencer will open a new entrance into the ground floor of the centre to avail of the extra flow of shoppers and, more particularly, to allow their customers to take their shopping directly to the overhead car-park.

Boots, the giant UK pharmacy chain, will have its first Dublin store on the mall which runs into Marks & Spencer.

In a centre with so many new names to Irish shoppers, it will be no surprise if the 400-seater restaurant is also operated by a firm previously unknown in Dublin. Worldwide catering group Compass is in negotiations to take the first-floor restaurant at a rent of £150,000 per year.

Aidan O'Hogan of Hamilton Osborne King says the Jervis Centre has attracted a "dream line up of tenants" even by UK standards. Any new shopping centre drawing up a list of tenants to be targeted would include Marks & Spencer, Debenhams, Boots, Bhs, Argos, Next, Dixons and Mothercare.

"For the first time in Ireland, we got all of them but even in a UK context, it is rare enough that you would get so many big names." He said the city centre location appealed to all the tenants but the tax designated status was an important catalyst in securing a prompt commitment from most of the tenants.

The Jervis Centre is expected to attract more than 300,000 shoppers per week. If it goes anywhere near hitting that target, it will copperfasten the recovery already evident in the Henry Street/Mary Street area.