When Roland Cubin walks you round what will eventually be a new Parisian apartment you have to use your imagination. "Here you will be in the kitchen, and here is the bathroom," says the deputy CEO of French real estate company Groupama Immobilier. It all sounds appealing, an upmarket flat in the west of Paris, but presently the space doesn't look like one at all.
That's because it's currently a corner of one floor of a nine-storey office building called Le Diamant, where 1,800 people work. Groupama Immobilier intends to convert the entire building into apartments. It should be the first of many such office-to-apartments conversions in the surrounding area.
We are in La Défense, the purpose-built, business district of the French capital, where the city has congregated its modern skyscrapers. Mirroring a similar trend in places such as New York, Washington DC and London; Paris La Défense, the public development authority that runs the area, has unveiled plans to turn up to a fifth of the office buildings into housing. Cubin leads us into what is currently a conference room in the centre of the building.
It has no windows, which is indicative of a big challenge when turning offices into apartments – what to do with the large amount of space in the middle of every floor that doesn't get any natural light. "There won't be any rooms there. Just access," says Roland Cubin, in reference to lifts and stairs.
Other issues include the need for more plumbing, and ceilings that can be too low. Despite these challenges, there is a simple reason why there are plans for so many conversions – demand for offices in La Défense and across Paris has plummeted since the Covid-19 pandemic and the growth of homeworking. "La Défense has a vacancy rate of 14-15% which is higher than it used to be," says Pierre-Yves Guice, CEO of Paris La Défense.
He adds that another reason for the conversion programme is the need to transform the business district from a place where the only thing people do is work. "To retain companies in France and in Western Europe we need to diversify these office landscapes of the last century, because no-one wants to work in such an environment any longer," says Guice. Ludovic Delaisse, CEO of the French arm of the Canadian real estate business Colliers, says that demand for office space in Paris has fallen by almost a third over the past five to six years.
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