Plans afoot for former Destination Maternity building in NoLibs

The owner of the former Destination Maternity warehouse in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia plans to spend $60 million to convert it into creative workspace.

It will be called SoNo.

Alliance Partners HSP of Bryn Mawr, Pa., bought the 220,000-square-foot property at 5th and Spring Garden streets for $14 million last fall and had been contemplating what to do with it ever since. Destination Maternity, which relocated to South Jersey, had used the property for its headquarters and warehousing.

At one point, the Market Place Design Center had put it on its list of options for a possible site to relocate. Alliance Partners HSP also researched the market to see if a tenant might be around to back fill the entire property.

“Clearly, that wasn’t happening,” said Rich Previdi, managing partner of Alliance Partners HSP.

Alliance Partners HSP has focused on office redevelopment in the suburbs, most notably ArborCrest in Blue Bell, Pa., and it decided to tap that experience with what is its first Philadelphia property.

“It would have been a nice surprise to do some other use other than redevelop office, but that’s not our core business,” Previdi said.

Then again, Previdi knew it couldn’t just do another typical office conversion. In its quest to determine what type of office redevelopment it should do, Previdi said he and his team visited the corporate offices of Airbnb Inc., Salesforce.com, among others to harvest ideas for what to do at Destination Maternity.

“We needed to find the edge of redevelopment — architecturally and functionally — and we think we have,” Previdi said. “In Philadelphia, there hasn’t been a lot of horizontal redevelopment in the Philadelphia area and there are historical reasons for that.”

For one, there’s not a port where a series of old warehouses are available.

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Previdi believes the project will be able to capture a segment of office tenants that is seeking this so-called horizontal space and not looking to be in a sleek office tower in the Central Business District. In many respects, Comcast Corp. is trying to create a vertical version of this warehouse-creative space in its new Comcast Innovation and Technology Center.

Alliance Partners HSP is actively marketing the project to tenants and is not looking to lease it to firms that focus on co-working spaces like Benjamin’s Desk. It figures the space will appeal to tech, advertising and media, among others.

Companies also recognize that a portion of the city’s creative class and millennials are already located in and around the Northern Liberties neighborhood and are eager be near those areas for recruitment reasons.

“Collaboration, branding and recruitment are the three big drivers of taking this type of space,” Previdi said.

How much in rents does he expect to get? Low-$30s a square foot.

“We feel really good about this,” he said. “This is not a building for everybody but on the other hand, if you like it and want it, it’s not like there are five of them to chose from.”

The structure will be totally renovated and expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2017.

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal