Wall Streeters Put Stock in Designer : Workplace: When investment bankers plan a move to new digs, they look to ‘space policeman’ to maximize efficiency.
When Wall Street’s white-shoe investment bankers want someone to design their new trading floors and executive dining rooms, they turn to a woman born on an Indian reservation during the Great Depression.
Margo Grant, 58, heads the New York office of Gensler & Associates, a San Francisco architecture and interior-design firm. Gensler designed Morgan Stanley Group’s new offices on Broadway; it’s in the process of moving Lazard Freres & Co. from one part of Rockefeller Center to another, and it’s planning CS First Boston’s move to quarters on Madison Avenue.
Born in Montana to a Chippewa father and a mother who was the daughter of Scottish immigrants, Grant might seem an unlikely person to design the boardrooms of Wall Street’s old-line banks. But since setting up Gensler’s New York office in 1979, Grant has made it the most fashionable firm in a competitive and lucrative business.
She did it by paying attention to the cost and efficiency of projects, as well as the “fun stuff” that architects love, such as choosing fabrics or designing aesthetically pleasing rooms, Grant says.
“I call myself the space policeman,” Grant said in an interview in her Rockefeller Center office overlooking the NBC “Today” Studios. “Everyone thinks we’re the ones who pick out the wall colors, but that’s just a small part.”
Moving an investment bank into a new building is no small feat. Morgan Stanley began moving into a glass tower just north of Times Square last weekend. By the time the whole firm has moved in, it’ll occupy almost a million square feet.
While it’s important that board rooms and offices be pleasant to work in, it’s the telecommunications and computer systems that interlace the mammoth trading-floors and clutter the desks of investment bankers that are the biggest challenge, said Jeffrey Williams, a Morgan Stanley managing director overseeing the firm’s move.
“It’s like building a huge computer and then slotting hundreds of people inside it,” Williams said.
About 40% of the cost of a big move goes for technological infrastructure such as air-conditioning, said Walter Hunt, a managing partner at Gensler. Lazard spent almost a third of its money refitting a 60-year-old building so it could take the miles of wiring the investment bank needed, Hunt said.
That requires intense planning by Grant and her team of 140 designers. To build a single trading floor for Goldman, Sachs & Co. earlier this year, Gensler put together 15 sets of drawings just to examine various layouts and different sizes of desk.
“[An extra] six inches between desks can make a difference of several traders on a floor,” Grant said.
Goldman was Grant’s first New York client in 1979, when she moved the investment bank to its headquarters down Broad Street from the New York Stock Exchange. Since then, Gensler’s New York branch has grown bigger than its home office in San Francisco and added a string of gilt-edged clients, from J.P. Morgan & Co. to law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell.
It’s a lucrative business for a firm like Gensler, which also numbers Gap Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. among its clients. About a quarter of its $82 million in billings for the year ended in April came from the New York office’s financial services, consulting and law-firm clientele.
CS First Boston, which plans to move at the end of next year, is paying Gensler about $2.25 million to design the interiors of its building at the foot of Madison Avenue, said Luther Terry, the First Boston managing director in charge of the move.
The firm is worth the money to First Boston, Terry said. That’s because Grant is able to adapt to the frequent changes in plans required by big securities firms, he said.
“Architects have a penchant for getting hysterical when you tell them something has to change,” Terry said. “The investment banking business is all about change, and Gensler has been good about accepting change.”
Gensler hasn’t snared every big investment banking move. Skidmore Owings & Merrill is designing a new building for the New York Mercantile Exchange in Battery Park City, and Smith Barney Inc.’s move to the TriBeCa area was handled by Swanke Hayden Connell.
Still, the firm has managed to keep plenty of its clients coming back, a sure sign it’s doing a good job, said Robert Bennis, a principal at Bennis & Reissman, a consulting firm.
“Margo’s very smart,” Bennis said. “She knows you’ve got to get from the beginning to the end without creating disruption.”
