There’s no arguing the quality of Estée Lauder’s new London digs. Exemplar’s 1 Fitzroy Place, W1, offers the global beauty house eight floors of grade-A loveliness and a vibrant community growing quickly around it. But a bladder so full your eyes might pop can sap the joy out of even the most desirable of workplaces. Just ask the mainly female workforce at Estée Lauder who, owing to a little too much equality in the ratio of male-to-female facilities required in their new office, were caught short one too many times. The number of crossed legs on show has prompted some male-to-female toilet conversions – resulting, no doubt, in great relief all round.
Main image: Alamy
A memorable memorial
Two moving encomia and one comic simile graced the memorial service for Irvine Sellar at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue near Lord’s cricket ground on 17 May, writes Peter Bill.
An audience of 250 filled the banked circle of pews, gathered to remember the life of the developer of the Shard, who died in February, aged 82.
Gerald Ronson’s voice thickened at the end of his goodbye to an old friend and fellow cigar lover.
The praise a divided world should hear was from Arab to Jew: from His Excellency Sheikh Abdulla Bin Saoud Al-Thani, governor of Qatar Central Bank. “Irvine was a man I learnt to call my brother,” said the man who rescued the Shard from bankruptcy in 2008.
Foreign secretary Boris Johnson provided the comedy. In a video clip the former London mayor called Irvine Sellar’s true memorial “an intergalactic cocktail stick erupting through the earth’s crust”.
Ford Browned off
Diary loves a bit of politics. And while there is plenty going on right now, sometimes a look back into the past provides a good chuckle. Baroness Margaret Ford was the keynote speaker at JLL’s annual Honor Chapman Memorial Lecture this year and offered up this memory of her days as chairman of English Partnerships. Not long after becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown summoned Ford to Number 10 for a telling off on how few homes had been built that week. “Why aren’t we building on all this public sector land?” he demanded – or words to such effect. “Well,” responded Ford, “you were next door last week and told us we couldn’t sell it off!” Ah, politicians. They love a good U-turn, don’t they?
Diary trumped
Regular readers will no doubt excitedly recall last week’s look at the AL.SK190 Heavy Lift Crane currently hard at work on CapCo’s Earl’s Court regeneration. Diary put it forward as the card to beat in a fantasy Top Trumps set, but we may have broken the cardinal rule of the game – by over-egging one key stat. It’s all the fault of abbreviations. Instead of a winch speed of up to 150mph, we should have recorded 150m per hour – a subtle, but crucial, difference. As sharp-eyed reader Richard Snowdon FRICS, of Inner Temple, pointed out (after downloading the crane’s user manual to check): “4,000 tonnes moving by winch at 150mph would be somewhat hazardous to large swathes of West London!” Indeed it would. EG’s crane correspondent has been told to clear their desk.
The magic retouch
You have to take promotional images of buildings with a pinch of salt. It’s inevitable that real life won’t be quite as bright, shiny and blemish-free as the often computer-augmented (or even generated) vision of loveliness that is offered by your typical developer. Could the same be true of Rockspring and Marshall CDP’s new flagship development at 6 Queen Street, Leeds? The pair are happy to say they have just let 46,000 sq ft to a FTSE 100 company on a 10-year lease. The announcement is accompanied by a photo of the site. Is it a fully warts-and-all picture of the building, or has there perhaps been some cosmetic enhancement? Well, Diary is no image analyst, but perhaps the clue is the in the file name on the attachment, including as it does – in capital letters – the word “RETOUCH”…
