Looking out from his Shaftesbury Avenue offices over the London skyline which was shaped more than anyone else by his father in the now-distant property booms of the 1960s and 1970s, John Seifert says firmly: “We’re financially strong, we’re fresh and we have a good team.”
In the first major press interview he has given since it was announced in July that Seifert Ltd and four subsidiaries had gone into receivership, John Seifert is at pains to explain that this was only one of three main firms trading under the Seifert name.
R Seifert & Partners, of which John Seifert has been senior partner since Richard Seifert retired in March 1989 at the age of 78, was the practice responsible for such London landmarks as the National Westminster Tower, Centre Point, Cutlers Gardens, Drapers Gardens and the Sheraton Park Tower Hotel. This has not been affected by the receivership.
Nor is Seifert International affected. This is the practice owned by John Seifert and others which undertakes major projects in France, Germany, Egypt, Singapore and elsewhere around the world, in association with local firms.
The company in receivership, Seifert Ltd, was the holding firm operating in the UK which got into difficulty with its office building in Docklands. It designed and developed the Mansion (originally called Fleet House), partially for its own use. This £10m office scheme of 43,600 sq ft at Marsh Wall on the Isle of Dogs was sold to the Greig Middleton Enterprise Zone Trust, subject to a leaseback at £872,000 a year, but, owing to the property recession and the problems with the Docklands market, it was unable to meet it. The new company, John Seifert Ltd, was formed to acquire the architectural business of Seifert Ltd from the receiver, Ernst & Young, with the support of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
“Our problems are all behind us,” says John Seifert. “Everything has its good side. The recession has given us a chance to reappraise ourselves, and we have been able to decide where we want to go in the future.”
At its peak, the Seifert group had more than 300 staff, but this included its associates overseas. “Now we have a total of 93 in London, Leeds and overseas in Paris, Cairo and Singapore.”
The London practice has John Seifert as chief executive and Simon Alexander and Lawrie Winter responsible for client liaison, with four other architects as directors: the design team headed by Malcolm Noakes and Ian Franks, and the operations team run by Keith Young and Frank Johnson. There is also an administrative director, Philip Helm, and a legal director, Stephanie Kirwan.
The Leeds office is an associated practice reformed as Carey Jones Seifert since the receivership. Armand Melot Seifert, the Paris practice, has John Seifert as chairman, Malcolm Noakes and French architect-planner Thierry Melot as joint managing directors, and engineer Dominique Armand as managing partner.
John Seifert, now 43, trained at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University of London, and is registered to practise as an architect in the United States, France and Germany. His wife is German and he speaks the language. Noakes, who was also at the Bartlett, speaks French and has a French wife.
Though he admits that he is increasingly looking for work from overseas, John Seifert says this is not a short-term emergency move. “It has been our strategy for the past seven years to build up our capacity for work in Europe and further afield, but it is not enough for architects to try to resolve their UK problems by looking for work abroad. We have built up our local expertise and our knowledge of local laws and building regulations,” he says. “Most of our work overseas is for local clients, and our staff overseas in Paris, Frankfurt, Cairo and Singapore are all local, but we have architects in our London office who come from all over Europe.”
In Paris, Seifert International has designed Continental Square, the first development to be completed at Roissypole, the new business park at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Roissy, which will eventually have three hotels (one a 400-bed Hilton, also designed by Seifert), shops, and a conference and exhibition centre. Developed by Paul Raingold’s Generale Continentale Investissements, Continental Square has 240,000 sq ft of air-conditioned space in four six-storey blocks set around a private courtyard in the middle of which a glass pyramid – a smaller version of that at the Louvre – provides daylight to an underground restaurant.
Already having its own RER suburban express railway station, Roissypole will soon be directly linked to the three air terminals and eventually to the TGV station planned for Roissy.
Seifert International now has 20 staff in its Paris office and another 20 in Frankfurt, where it is working with two German firms. There are eight in Singapore and four in Cairo, and some will soon be needed in Czechoslovakia. Only last month, Seifert International unveiled plans for a major commercial development in the centre of Prague, where 350,000 sq ft of offices and a 250-bedroom hotel are planned above the city’s Wilson railway station by a consortium of Amec, Anglo-Czech Trading Co and Seifert.
Back in the UK, John Seifert Ltd’s programme of work is much more diversified than it used to be when the group was happy to claim that it had designed and built more than 3,000 projects, of which 500 were office blocks.
“We were pigeonholed as office architects, although we had always done a lot of housing, hospitals, hotels and leisure developments. New office developments are slow to come off the ground at the moment, and most schemes in the pipeline are currently being reappraised,” Siefert says. “An architect can handle many different building types, but we are becoming more specialised. About 30% of our work now is hotels, and we are also working on two hospitals at Homerton and Frimley through a sister company, Archimed, which has separate directors and shareholders.”
Having recently completed a 400-bedroom Holiday Inn at King’s Cross, on the site of the Post Office’s former central sorting office at Mount Pleasant, Seifert is now on site with a 230 bedroom Novotel in Lambeth Road, opposite Lambeth Palace. It has also obtained detailed planning permission for a Skandia Hotel at Heathrow Airport.
More unusually, it is currently on site with a new prison at Doncaster, and is working on the designs for a 55,000-seat stadium for Glasgow Celtic. At London City Airport, one of its biggest developments in recent years, it is now working on alterations and modifications.
Although Sandwell Shopping Mall, its competition-winning scheme for the Black Country Development Corporation, is not going ahead yet, it has just started on site at Spring Place, Southampton, with a 65,000-sq-ft office development for Gazeley Properties. One of its major projects still awaiting a start is Bishopsbridge, a joint redevelopment by Hyperion, Higgs & Hill and Regalian of the 11-acre Paddington Goods Yard in west London, where it has obtained outline planning permission for 1.5m sq ft of offices and 200,000 sq ft of residential space for housing associations.
Outline permission has also been obtained for the redevelopment of Cannon Street Station, EC4, for Eagle Star Properties to provide a new station concourse, some shops and 450,000 sq ft of offices to replace the 1960s offices above the station.
John Seifert insists that his approach to architecture differs from that of his father by being more concerned with urban design. “People came to Richard Seifert in the 1960s and 1970s because they wanted exciting buildings. In the 1980s, we were providing various types of architecture for many different types of client, and there was probably too much variety for people to identify what we were about,” he admits.
“My aim is to make our architecture more identifiable, with a consistent approach throughout the practice. It goes back to my training in urban design. There has been an overobsession with the way buildings are dressed up stylistically, with each building trying to shout louder than its neighbour, but we should be more concerned with how people use buildings and the spaces around them to create an urban entity.”
No one should doubt that John Seifert’s architectural standards are high. Since he won the City Heritage Award in 1982 for Cutlers Gardens, EC2 – his first major project – he is particularly proud of having won the RICS Inner City Award 1989 for London City Airport, the 1991 City Heritage Award for the refurbishment of 7a Laurence Pountney Hill, EC4, and a local amenity society award in 1991 for Lansdowne Building in Croydon.
So what stylish new building does he have up his sleeve for the future? Although many interesting schemes are still under wraps, he has just made a planning application for National Westminster Bank’s new building in Lombard Street, EC3. “Well, you wouldn’t expect us to sit twiddling our thumbs, would you?” he says with a smile.
Michael Hanson BSc is a freelance writer on property and architecture.
