Rules don’t build culture: Why the office has to become a magnet again

Return to office: a shift from policy to pull

As such, a more durable strategy is starting to take shape across the United Kingdom and Europe: a shift from policy to pull. If employers want to bring people together, the office has to be worth the journey for its comfort, convenience, hospitality, and a sense that being there improves the working experience instead of just ticking a box, through spaces that feel curated, not simply efficient, and a “welcome” that starts at the front door, not at the desk.

In the UK, the limits are increasingly measurable. A recent study by King’s College London found that only 42% of workers said they would comply with a five-day return-to-office requirement – a reduction from earlier in the hybrid era – and also found that many would look for a new job or quit if pushed too hard. Other workplace research points to the same behavioural truth: poorly executed mandates can reduce compliance, while renovated, better-designed offices can increase the pull factor and lift in-person working.

The key question is no longer ‘how do we require people to come in?’ but ‘what do we offer that makes people want to?’

Turning attendance from obligation into habit

In this new reality, the most persuasive office spaces are no longer defined only by marble reception desks or high-spec meeting rooms, but by design choices that remove the irritations that turn a commute into resentment. This often includes a calm ‘arrival sequence’ complete with warmer materials, softer acoustics, and somewhere to land, and working spaces that encourage circulation, making collaboration feel natural rather than scheduled and mandated.

A building that reliably delivers a good day might also involve good coffee, genuinely usable collaboration space, quiet corners that stay quiet, showers and lockers that are clean and safe, and terraces that aren’t tokenistic, together with amenities (such as gyms) that add value to being in the office.

These appear to be factors that turn attendance from obligation into habit. And habit, in a hybrid world, is a scarce asset. Often it comes down to the things people feel more than they notice: more daylight, more greenery, some outdoor ‘spill out’ space, and a choice between being in the mix and being quietly out of it, with open areas when you want energy, and tucked-away corners when you need to focus.

The best-in-class office experience

20 Manchester Square, for which Lazard signed a 15-year lease and now occupies, is a good example of the ‘magnet’ thesis expressed through refurbishment rather than gimmicks, delivering on the same themes that now drive attendance: tenant wellbeing and practical ease. The recent renovation of 20 Manchester Square includes end-of-trip facilities and a new core designed to improve flexibility and allow floors to be subdivided. It also benefits from a landscaped rooftop terrace, a ‘quality-of-day’ feature that has become a quiet differentiator in the West End.

What makes Manchester Square particularly useful as an example is the way it moved from an occupier story to an investor story. In May 2025, advisers described the asset as recently refurbished and extended and highlighted Lazard’s long lease as a vote of confidence in the West End market. There’s also a subtle ‘reuse as premium’ story here: retaining and upgrading existing fabric is increasingly part of the quality narrative, not just the sustainability narrative.

If Manchester Square shows the ‘day upgrade’ refurbishment, The Lazari Building, the former Fenwick store on New Bond Street/Brook Street, designed by Foster + Partners, shows the bigger swing: turning a landmark retail box into a headquarters experience.

In June 2025, Lazari announced that US law firm, McDermott, Will & Schulte agreed a 15-year lease for all 115,000 sq. ft of office space across floors two to nine, relocating from 22 Bishopsgate to its new UK HQ in 2028.  For those of us at McDermott, the move reads less like a change of address and more like a deliberate bet on making in-person time feel genuinely worthwhile: it’s about how we work, as well as where we work. It’s also about creating space that reflects the firm’s ethos of collaboration at the heart of where private capital and private equity do business, demonstrated through an office designed less as a backdrop and more as an environment for teams, clients and deal-making.

As best-in-class office space, The Lazari Building will draw on natural light and space throughout the building and provide its growing headcount with external terraces and roof-top garden entertainment space, together with a mezzanine bar, a wellness centre, changing rooms and cycle bays – state-of-the-art amenities available to be enjoyed by the building staff and their clients alike. All of that sits within a retained, recognisable façade –, with its heritage a familiar street presence, but with a very different experience behind it.

Whilst the strategic headline is a state-of-the-art office space that sits alongside its primary client base, there is an additional and important logic to the space: a workplace designed to feel like a destination: more light, more air, more social gravity because that is what changes behaviour. When a firm is asking people to commute, it is also asking them to prefer the office  to their alternatives. Buildings like this are an attempt to make that preference rational. Terraces, roof gardens and informal “in-between” spaces do the quiet work here: they create reasons to stay, to meet, and to bring clients without everything defaulting to a meeting room.

Workplace experience as an underwriting criterion

Private capital is underwriting ‘desirability’ as a leasing strategy.  This isn’t only an owner-occupier trend. Private equity real estate and other private capital have become increasingly comfortable with the idea that ‘the experience’ is part of underwriting because it’s important to leasing outcomes.

Patron Capital’s ‘Creative’, on the western crescent of Paris, Levallois-Perret/Neuilly border), designed by DTACC, is a clean example: redeveloped to include a rooftop garden and circa 3,000 sq. m of amenities, including two restaurants and a gym, plus active-commute facilities and a dramatic entrance experience.

‘Creative’ secured a long lease to LVMH Fragrance Brands: exactly the kind of outcome that turns ‘workplace desirability’ from a design preference into an underwriting result. Patron’s Keith Breslauer framed it plainly, stating that the strategy was a ‘high quality and sustainability-led’ office created through refurbishment, with the amenity-as-masterplan strategy validated by its leasing success. The newly refurbished building behaves like a small mixed-use destination, with food, wellness, and roof-level outdoor space performing many of the same functions as a neighbourhood.

The office market in the UK

In the UK, the most interesting magnet strategies often combine amenities with place-making. Savills’ late-2025 research paper highlights the pressure created by exceptionally low -Grade- A tower vacancy and strong demand for premium space, a dynamic that encourages owners to compete on the lived experience of buildings, not just their technical specification. That’s why the ‘ground plane’ matters more than ever: lobbies that feel generous, edges that engage the street, and an address that feels embedded in the city rather than sealed off from it.

With that said, the office market still looks distinctly two-tier: best-in-class, ESG-credible space wins the rent, the liquidity, and the headlines, while older, less efficient buildings need a story. Recent Central London numbers capture the tension, with Grade A taking an outsized share of leasing (roughly 70 – 80% in recent quarters), even as prime City tower vacancy has tightened to very low levels (around 2.6%, or 1.9% once under-offers are included), while around three-quarters of available supply is still Grade B.

In that environment, a counterargument emerges: if prime space is rationed and pipelines stay constrained, some occupiers will simply take what they can get in the right locations, making “‘high-touch’ landlord fit-out and lifestyle amenities less decisive at the margin. Economic pressure pushes the same way: with fit-out and all-in occupancy costs elevated, more businesses are weighing renewals or short extensions rather than paying for disruption. It doesn’t kill the magnet thesis; it just means the premium shows up most clearly at renewal, and in resale, when the market decides which buildings still feel like the obvious choice. In this environment, owners could be tempted to spend less: , with the rationale that if space is scarce enough, it may not make sense to over-capitalise on terraces, hospitality lobbies, and layered amenities, when tenants may anyway choose to lease office spaces that are ‘good enough’.

Reuters has also noted that, amid demand for premium offices and a constrained investment market, tightening supply could eventually support second-hand space as well. In other words, scarcity can compress the ‘spec spread’ in the short term:, as strong locations clear even when the offer is simpler.

The scarcity argument is real, but it doesn’t kill the magnet thesis: it mostly changes where it matters and how it pays back. A building may lease simply because it’s available, but the buildings that are actively preferred tend to win stronger (and financially stronger) tenants, longer commitments, and a clearer ability to hold rent through cycles, especially for occupiers where talent, brand, and client experience matter.

Scarcity can pull occupiers into accepting offices they consider ‘good enough’, but it doesn’t guarantee that they will continue to make those compromises when options reopen or when their own footprint changes. By contrast, magnet buildings are built to win not just the initial lease-up, but  decisions that follow too. And in volatile markets, the most liquid assets are the ones a future buyer can underwrite without heroic assumptions. A well-executed, experience-led refurbishment doesn’t just look nicer: it can make income feel more durable and reletting risk feel more manageable. Put simply, the right interventions reduce reletting friction because the building’s story is legible from the moment someone walks in.

Conclusion

While return-to-office mandates can fill calendars, they can’t manufacture the feeling that the office makes sense. The thread that runs through the best-in-class office examples is simple: by making the office do more and removing friction, employers can give their staff a good reason to prefer being there.

As a result, the smartest office assets are becoming more like well-run members’ clubs: warm, dependable, quietly efficient and socially useful spaces where presence feels like an advantage, not an instruction. This in turn drives a trend for refurbishment that is pragmatic rather than decorative, favouring adaptive reuse over demolition, with light and air treated as luxuries, outdoor space as social infrastructure, and shared areas acting as the building’s heart, promoting and embodying collaboration rather than simply serving as a corridor to the lifts.