New owners eye millennial-friendly makeover for Costa Mesa’s MetroCenter

New owners, new look.

After New Jersey-based Prudential Real Estate Investors teamed with Costa Mesa-based McCarthy Cook & Co. to acquire MetroCenter at South Coast, the new owners plan an extensive makeover that they hope will re-energize the 17-acre business complex.

The companies closed the purchase of the Costa Mesa property last month, obtaining MetroCenter’s three 12-story office buildings at 535, 555 and 575 Anton Blvd. and the 24 Hour Fitness health club at 589 Anton.

The office buildings cover about 800,000 square feet and were built in phases starting in 1984.

Edward Cook, co-president of McCarthy Cook, said the biggest and most dramatic change will be the creation of an indoor and outdoor work environment for the tenants of the cube-like office buildings. Current tenants include credit reporting agency Experian Inc. and real estate financing company Sterns Lending.

“The architecture of the ‘60s and ‘70s favored a more boxed and closed look as having AC in the building became a luxury that people enjoyed,” Cook said. “But today, there’s a totally different texture on how people eat, work and play. We live in the best weather, so you’ll see that these indoor-outdoor workplaces are becoming more common.”

Over the next year and a half, designers and construction workers will create more seating areas outdoors, install reverse-osmosis drinking fountains in the campus’ central courtyard and replace some of the dark glass windows on the first floor with massive sliding doors that will lead to outdoor patio areas.

The plans not only will give MetroCenter tenants a comfortable place to work but also an exhilarating place to eat, Cook said.

For the first time, the central courtyard will accommodate a runway for food trucks during lunch hour.

“What we want to provide is a revolving door of gourmet food trucks,” Cook said. “There’s a certain energy when you’re walking to get food and you know it’s going to change every week.”

The owners also plan to build a 1-mile fitness loop around the campus with stations for yoga, pull-up bars and water bottle fill-ups. The fitness path likely will connect with the 51,000-square-foot 24 Hour Fitness.

A new bike-share program will enable tenants to ride communal bikes to neighboring attractions such as South Coast Plaza, The Camp, The Lab and South Coast Collection, Cook said.

Many of the renovations were inspired by the workspaces of Silicon Valley and were chosen to appeal to working millennials, McCarthy Cook officials said.

“It’s not so much about the location [of Silicon Valley] but it’s more about how they work,” Cook said. “They do things like inviting food trucks for people to have food from around the world and keeping the worker energized. … The [MetroCenter] campus will express itself in a similar way.”

According to JLL, an Orange County real estate market research group, millennials — defined as residents ages 22 to 34 — are heavily concentrated in cities such as Costa Mesa, Orange and Fullerton, making up 22% to 28% of the population.

“We definitely think Costa Mesa is the hip city of Orange County with places like The Lab and The Camp nearby and that it’s attracting millennials,” said Brian Harnetiaux, McCarthy Cook’s vice president of asset management. “Our goal is to help attract the talent to the property and to retain the talent once they’re here.”

MetroCenter’s owners are working on the property’s new designs with architects from the Newport Beach and San Diego offices of Gensler, a planning and consulting firm. Officials plan to break ground on the multimillion-dollar renovations late this summer and be finished in May 2017.

Prudential and McCarthy Cook acquired MetroCenter for an undisclosed price from an affiliate of San Francisco-based RREEF Funds LLC, which owned the property for about a decade.