🔒Buyers of massive Bloomfield MetLife property aim to lure workers back to office with premium amenities

Three decades ago, a 548,301-square-foot office building at 1300 Hall Blvd. in Bloomfield hosted thousands of Cigna workers.

Today, the building leases to several companies with a combined workforce of about 1,000. But only about 200 people actually work there on any given day, according to the building owners.

Real estate investors Harry Tawil, 36, and Jeffrey Chera, 32, have plans to turn that around.

Tawil and Chera are principals in The Atrium CT, a limited liability company that bought the enormous glass-and-granite-sided office building from MetLife for $10.4 million on Nov. 5.

Tawil said the pair will spend “many millions” of dollars in the coming months upgrading building amenities, including reopening a large athletic center, adding indoor putting greens and more.

The idea is to create a work environment that lures people who have become accustomed to working from home during the pandemic. Companies that want to bring back the collaboration and efficiencies of office culture will be drawn to the building, called “The Atrium at Gillette Ridge.”

“People will come back to work,” Tawil said. “It is a matter of where they come to work. We want to be the preferred option and we are making considerable investment toward that goal.”

‘Great possibilities’

MetLife maintains a presence and is leasing 75,000 square feet. Other tenants include actuarial firm Hooker & Holcombe and Trinity Health. The office building has room for about 3,000 workers, Chera said.

It has a large fitness center outfitted with modern equipment, along with a studio that can be used for dance or yoga. There is an enormous, mothballed cafeteria and lounge areas.

A 40,000-square-foot atrium, topped with a glass-pane roof and featuring a waterfall fountain, is the centerpiece of the building. Offices are arranged around the open-air center on four floors.

Tawil and Chera said they plan to add a game room with billiards and pingpong tables. There will be a golf simulator and indoor artificial turf putting greens.

The partners hope to eventually reopen the cafeteria under the management of Miguel Proano and Karlina Fontaine – owners of the Blue Plate Kitchen in West Hartford and Pastrami on Wry in Manchester.

Proano and Fontaine are starting on a smaller scale, opening a corner canteen called Blue Plate Café. It will offer coffee, pastries, sandwiches, soups and some warm-food options from breakfast through lunch hours.

“We know there’s great possibilities for foot traffic, there’s great possibilities of a lot of people here, a captive audience, shall we say,” Proano said.

For now, the building’s lower head count allows for a soft opening, Proano said. They can get to know customers’ tastes.

“One of the things we do best in both our restaurants is build a big following of regulars and just being able to have that here, seeing the same people every day, knowing their order, that’s kind of what we do best,” Fontaine said.

Upgrading space

Tawil and Chera said they will replace furniture and tiles on the ground floor. Fluorescent lighting throughout the building will be replaced with LED bulbs.

The 50 acres around the massive building offer shuffleboard courts, baseball fields and walking trails. The partners will add bocce courts, seating areas and outside fire pits.

“An employee that comes here will be able to practice their golf swing, have a workout, take a walk around the grounds – all on their lunch break,” Chera said.

A second-quarter 2021 analysis by commercial real estate services and investment firm CBRE highlighted the ongoing pandemic’s “significant” impact to the Greater Hartford office market.

Uncertain when employees would return, many companies opted for shorter-term leases.  Office vacancies in the market hit 20.3% by the close of the second quarter.

Most Greater Hartford office lease deals this year have focused on recently renovated, high-quality space, as tenants looked to relocate and upgrade their offices, CBRE found.

Chris Ostop, managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle in Hartford, said he anticipates a trend of companies consolidating to smaller, but nicer spaces.

Such moves shed unnecessary square footage in uncertain times without unsettling employees, Ostop said.

“You’ve accomplished the same thing as downsizing, but you’ve also improved the image and quality of the workplace,” Ostop said. “I think that’s what employers will be doing going forward. That’s what they are doing in every other market. It’s the flight to quality.”

As a former corporate headquarters, 1300 Hall Blvd., provides “a ton” of amenities in a good location, Ostop said.

“The bottom line is companies that have office spaces in nice buildings with great amenities are going to have better luck attracting their talent to come back into the office,” Ostop said.

Few office buildings have the room to offer amenities found in The Atrium building, said Joel M. Grieco, executive director at real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield.

Grieco brokered the Atrium sale and is now marketing the property to tenants.

“You can’t take a 100,000-square-foot building and dedicate 40,000 square feet to amenity space, but you can do that at The Atrium,” Grieco said.

The Atrium building came with two attached properties, a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing/warehouse building and a 41,000-square-foot “flex” building with high ceilings.

It cost Cigna about $130 million to build out the property in 1982, Grieco said.

Back then, the building was known as the “South Building,” part of a corporate campus that includes the 1957-vintage Wilde Building and a golf course.

Cigna sold the South Building to MetLife for $50 million in 2007, and consolidated offices into the Wilde building.

The Atrium’s current tenants are all large-scale users, but space can be carved out for offices of 2,000 to 3,000 square feet or smaller, Grieco said.

“We can lease to one- and two-people operations,” Grieco said.

Moving quickly

Tawil and Chera said they represent their families’ investments in the Atrium building. Chera’s family company, the Chera Realty Group, got its start in department stores then branched into real estate in the 1970s.

Tawil said his family operates through separate limited liability companies launched for individual projects.

Tawil and Chera said they have been searching for a joint investment opportunity for some time. They first stepped foot in the Bloomfield building in late July. MetLife wanted to sell by the close of the year, Chera said. An all-cash contract was reached in October. The deal closed Nov. 5.

Tawil said there was “a lot” of competition for the property.

“Part of the way we were able to secure the deal was our ability to move very quickly,” Tawil said. “It was really all hands on deck.”

Tawil said the building’s current tenants provide enough income to support expenses. The partners don’t have a prediction for how long it could take to fill the empty space.

“That’s the ten-and-a-half-million-dollar question," joked Chera.