It typically only takes a few steps into an office building before it feels familiar.
There’s usually an expansive and well-polished lobby. A security desk is often front and center, flanked by key card gates and elevator bays. Perhaps a few plants or an artistic light fixture adds some pizzazz.
But the newest office tower to join Midtown Atlanta’s skyline aims to feel familiar in a different way.
“We hope you walk in and are like, ‘Is this a hotel?’” That’s the reaction Travis Garland, managing director for developer Portman Holdings, said he hopes to garner at Ten Twenty Spring, a 25-story office tower that recently finished construction.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Located within Portman’s Spring Quarter development at Spring and 10th streets, the high-end office tower aims to separate itself from its peers by imitating the trappings of a luxe hotel.
“Think about the buildings that are nicer and newer with a hospitality feel, but they still feel a little bit corporate,” Garland said. “We wanted to go anti-that.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Named after its street address, the building offers 530,000 square feet of leasable office space, the most new workspace to join Atlanta’s office market this year.
Amid a boom of job growth, metro Atlanta was on an office building binge before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since offices closed in early 2020 to fight the coronavirus, the Atlanta area has broken records for its amount of unwanted and empty office space as remote and hybrid work schedules became more popular.
Still, many office sector observers expect to see a rebound in office usage and for high-end office towers to still command tenants and enjoy higher occupancy.
Ten Twenty Spring hasn’t landed an office tenant yet, although multiple restaurants are being built into the building and surrounding Spring Quarter district. But Atlanta-based Portman, one of the city’s most storied development firms, expects to see high demand for its top-of-the-line office space, which could be the last of its kind built in Midtown for the foreseeable future.
“There’s not another new building (like this) coming,” Garland said. “When you look at the finite amount of really high quality space … we’re encouraged by this.”
‘The newest and nicest’
Midtown in recent years has emerged as Atlanta’s most desirable office neighborhood, boasting towers bearing the logos of Fortune 500 companies next to luxury apartments and condos.
Spring Quarter’s office tower aspires to raise the ceiling even further.
Portman acquired the project site in 2019, paying roughly $40 million to buy the 4-acre property, which also includes the former H.M. Patterson & Son’s Spring Hill Chapel. The historic landmark, which was open from 1928 until 2020, held funerals for numerous famous Atlantans, including author Margaret Mitchell and mayors Ivan Allen and William Hartsfield.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The former funeral home building, which will be transformed into an event space and “morning-to-night” restaurant destination by 2026, lies in the shadow of Ten Twenty Spring and the Sora at Spring Quarter apartment building, which Portman finished last year. Consisting of 370 market-rate apartments, the Sora at Spring Quarter is 94% leased. It was initially going to include a hotel as a third tower, but that has been shelved for now.
Portman obtained a $224 million construction loan to build Ten Twenty Spring, but it declined to disclose the full cost of the project. Garland expects prospective tenants will be willing to pay to work from Atlanta’s newest office building in the heart of a bustling section of Midtown.
“If you want the newest and nicest, there’s not a lot of that,” he said. “So you do have to move quickly.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
He said the office building should demand rents in the high $40s to low $50s per square foot, which would rank on the high end for Midtown monthly rents. At the end of September, the average gross direct asking lease rate in Midtown was a little more than $41 per square foot, according to real estate services firm CBRE.
Embodying hospitality
Hotels are nothing new for Portman.
The development firm, founded by famed Atlanta architect and developer John C. Portman Jr., is known for building hotels with soaring atriums, such as the Hyatt Regency Atlanta and Atlanta Marriott Marquis.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Ten Twenty Spring, while not to the scale of those mammoth hotels, has hospitality baked into its DNA, Garland said.
Its lobby features couches and cushy chairs near a large fireplace. The eighth-floor amenity deck has abundant mingling space, including outdoor gathering spots. The top office floor has 14-foot-tall windows to make the most of the tower’s panoramic city views.
The building’s interior design was by Michael Shu, an architect out of Austin, Texas with an expansive catalog of refined and eclectic projects. The tower’s architects were KPS Group and HKS.
Ten Twenty Spring will house two future Japanese eateries and a swank bar from Fuyuhiko Ito, former executive chef of Umi. Mexican restaurant Habaneros is slated to open at neighboring Sora this coming spring, and Portman has a letter of intent to land another chef-inspired restaurant at the apartment building. Another restaurant space is still on the market.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Leasing activity, while slow compared to prepandemic times, has picked up throughout this year, leaving Garland optimistic about Ten Twenty Spring’s chances to land prospective tenants.
That is, assuming they don’t leave convinced it’s a hotel rather than an office building in disguise.
“Thematically, all offices are trying to go hospitality,” Garland said. “But this is next-level.”
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