08 Jun Curbed LA: Fancy New Glendale Offices Will Be First With Five-Star Concierge Service So Workers Never Have to Stop
By Bianca Barragan
Americana at Brand developer Rick Caruso has a plan to convert a former Masonic temple, originally built in 1927, into a mixed-use complex fusing groundfloor retail and restaurants with creative office space upstairs and, when it was announced in early April, it seemed like just another adaptive reuse project of a handsome old building. Now it’s revealed that it will actually be uniquely over the top. Bloomberg has details on some of the next-level amenities that will be available to the future tenants, beginning with concierge services. “After a long day at the office, you want us to pack a couple of steaks and a bottle of wine in your car? It’s done,” Caruso says. Caruso will be the first office landlord to offer “five-star concierge service.”
All the crap that everyone hates doing can be handed off to someone else, who will have it done before the workday ends. All the tenants’ employees will be able to get their car washed, their drycleaning picked up or dropped off, their parties planned, and their groceries shopped for by someone other schmuck. Yes, there are already companies that provide these services for people, but do they do it for free? Because these ones will be offered free of charge, without any concierge fees tacked on. Aside from having to pay for the goods themselves (groceries, dry cleaning), employees won’t have to fork over anything for the time-saving perk—the cost of which will be built into the rent.
Caruso says the services will be easy to provide because he happens to own an entire shopping mall across the street from this property (Americana at Brand). He also hopes to offer more little luxuries, like “translation services, access to The Americana’s movie theater for meetings, and in-office manicures and pedicures,” available by the year’s end. By basically giving employees their own assistants, the idea is that those workers will have more time to get home and hang out with their families—or, more realistically, stay at the office and work). “In addition, what I am getting out of it is 200 more new customers right across the street, walking over, using my restaurants, using my services,” Caruso says.
Source: Curbed LA