Hungarian unit of KBC starts building new head office in Budapest

TriGranit, a Hungary-based international real estate developer, has laid the foundation stone of the head office of K&H Group in Budapest on Monday.

The new, campus-style head office of K&H Group is being constructed in the Millennium City Center, over a floor area of 76,000 square meters that also consists of a three-storey underground parking facility.

Millennium City Center (areal view below), one of the biggest real estate developments in Central Europe, lies in the heart of Budapest on a site of over 5.5 hectares on the left bank of the river Danube.

K&H will purchase the 54,000 square meter building ‘K’, and lease the 22,000 square meter building ‘H’. Of this latter, approximately 9,500 square meters will be office space. Both buildings are designed by the Finta Architects’ Office.

“In designing and implementing the new head office, not only cost-effectiveness but environmental consciousness and sustainability also played an important part. The mechanical and electrical concepts applied, the furnishings, the acoustic, ergonomic and technical solutions, as well as the green roof gardens and terraces all point to an environmentally friendly operation,” TriGranit said in a statement on Monday.

Under this concept, TriGranit was the first in Hungary to launch a project under the LEEDŽ certification category – a US system based on environmental consciousness and sustainability criteria that provides the project with world-wide recognition.

“Our objective is to obtain Gold LEED Certification that would make us the first on the Hungarian real estate market to hold such certification. Using renewable energy resources, energy utilization is expected to drop by 30-40%, and the cost of operation will also decrease accordingly, to a significant degree,” said Árpád Török, CEO of TriGranit Development Corporation.

“It was a unique opportunity on the market to combine the client’s requirements with our company’s environmentally conscious thinking, to create a project that qualifies for LEED certification,” he added.