The owner of a landmark Cardiff city centre department store has ambitious plans that will completely change the site.
Cardiff's famous Howells building occupies a 1.7 acre site that fronts both St Mary Street and The Hayes in the city centre.
At present the only occupier is House of Fraser but the new plans will see the building become home to a number of new tenants.
The plans include introducing leisure, food and beverage, accommodation, and office space to the historic site. Change of use applications are going in this week.
"Right now the building is 277,000 sq ft, and House of Fraser has been operating in half of that," explained Azeemeh Zaheer, CEO of Naissance Capital Real Estate, who acquired the site in 2016 .
"We all know retail doesn't need that large of a footplate. This asset is almost two acres of freehold property in the middle of a city centre and it holds a huge significance to people of Cardiff and Wales."
While Ms Zaheer was unable to reveal the name of the new tenants coming in at this stage she said there will an announcement in the next fortnight for a big name that will be taking over part of the site.
"We are not looking to take out retail, we're just looking to create a truly mixed use scheme," Ms Zaheer added.
Ms Zaheer believes a mixed use site will be of benefit to all the businesses on the site.
"Everywhere you go in all the major cities around the world, to increase footfall you need a healthy mix of leisure, office, potentially a place to stay and retail, maybe a place to eat and drink.
"Because it such a large property it is like it a city within itself. It doesn't make sense to isolate it into one specific asset class, it makes sense to create, and curate a place with businesses that complement each other, help increase footfall for each other and that's what we have been working on."
"Because this is such a beautiful asset and there has been so much interest in Cardiff, and investment in Cardiff we also been benefiting from that. We've had a lot of interest into this space and we've been thinking about which tenant would be best complement the other tenant, and what would be the best for job creation.
"When Sports Direct bought over House of Fraser and we worked with them to provide a licence to continue on and we were together able to save 250 jobs.
"At its peak the building had 500 people working here and the plans we have in store for Howells is to take the jobs back to more than 500."
Ms Zaheer is keen to hire and appoint all local talent.
"We wanted to highlight Welsh talent and ingenuity," she explains.
As a result the Cardiff-based Rio Architects, commercial real estate agency EJ Hales, and property and construction consultancy Gleeds have all been working with Naissance Capital on the project.
