French fashion brand due to move into New Bond Street address next year

McLaren has signed on the dotted line for a £60m scheme that will be the flagship store for Yves Saint Laurent in London’s West End.

The upmarket fashion retailer’s owner is understood to be paying £13m a year in rent – a record in the UK – for the site on the corner of New Bond Street and Grafton Street.

McLaren has been on a PCSA for the job with O&H Properties for the past few months but has now formally inked the deal which will see a seven-storey development built that will cover 5,400 sq m.

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The seven-storey scheme will be YSL’s flagship in the UK

Designed by Foster & Partners, the lower ground, ground and first floor will be given over to retail space for YSL with five storeys of office and event space above.

McLaren, which is also working on several similar schemes on London’s Oxford Street, will carry out the work under a top-down construction programme in order for the scheme to be ready next spring.

An extensive temporary works scheme includes 33m deep 1.2m diameter piles and 15m steel plunge columns to support the cores and ground floor slab, which will allow the basement box and jump forming of cores to happen simultaneously.

Subcontractors working on the job include groundwork and basement box contractor McGee, steel frame firm BHC, pre-cast façade supplier Techcrete and glazing firm Seele.

The work is the first phase in three planned phases of a wider scheme with a grade II-listed shopfront for Wartski jewellers – which made the ring for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011 – at 14 Grafton Street already dismantled ahead of reassembly in nearby Barlow Place at a later date.

And the final phase of the work will feature new homes, a hotel, office and retail space, bars and restaurants.

The job is close to another Fosters’ scheme which will see a deep retrofit of the former Fenwick department store which closed early last year.

Fosters’ plans would deliver a 38% increase in floorspace at the site. The current buildings have 12,292 sq m of retail space and 2,287 sq m of office space.

Under the proposals for property firm Lazari Investments, the amount of retail space would drop to 4,692 sq m but there would be a significant increase in office accommodation, to 16,262sq m.

Lazari bought the Fenwick buildings in 2022 for a price reportedly in excess of £400m.

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