The revival of Oxford Street is being boosted by a “once-in-a-100-year” transformation of the empty House of Fraser flagship into a huge office, shops, restaurant, gym and swimming pool complex.
The £132 million project at 318 Oxford Street is on course for completion next year despite the massive engineering challenges presented by the modernisation of the crumbling 1930s German art deco building.
On reopening it will be known as the Elephant and the owners hope it will help draw workers and shoppers back into the West End.
The store was originally constructed for DH Evans in 1937 with a 140ft frontage on Oxford Street and eight and a half acres of selling space.
It was renamed House of Fraser in 1987 and has played host to a series of famous names over the years, including Rihanna who launched a fragrance there in 2011 and Robbie Williams, who unveiled his menswear range the same year.
It was best known as one of a row of four huge department stores between Oxford Circus and Marble Arch: Selfridges, House of Fraser, Debenhams and John Lewis.
Two of them, House of Fraser and Debenhams, closed in part because of the impact of the pandemic, contributing to the sense of decline on Europe’s leading shopping destination. Both are now being restored as office-led developments.
The House of Fraser store finally closed in January 2022 after landlord, the Liechtenstein-registered Publica Properties Establishment, believed to be owned by a wealthy family, served notice on owners Frasers Group.
The complex project will see the creation of a 366,000 sq ft, eight-storey building with office space from the first to the seventh floors. The newly created eighth storey will have a rooftop restaurant and terrace with 360-degree views across London, while the ground floor will be occupied by shops in a double height retail space above a private gym and 25-metre swimming pool.
Project managers MGAC and contractors McLaren say they have sought to reuse as much of the building’s original structure as possible, including relocating 10 steel columns retrieved from the demolished fifth floor to the new eighth floor.
The building is badly affected by so called “Regent Street disease” that blights many early 20th century buildings with steel structures clad in masonry.
Corrosion of the steel structure can result in the stone facade coming loose. Netting was put up around the building in 2019 to prevent crumbling stone falling on shoppers below.
