Christie’s Renews 400K-SF Lease at Rockefeller Center

A famed auction house isn’t letting its Midtown headquarters in Rockefeller Center go to the next highest bidder.

Christie’s has renewed its 400,000-square-foot space at 20 Rockefeller Plaza for another 25 years, according to landlord Tishman Speyer, which declined to disclose the asking rent in the deal. Office asking rents in Midtown averaged $78.73 per square foot in July, according to a report from Colliers.

The auction house has locations across the globe, but its sale rooms and corporate offices at Rockefeller Center have served as the New York City headquarters of Christie’s since 1997, where works like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” and Andy Warhol’s “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” have been sold. Its Rockefeller Center space also has public galleries and warehouse space.

“This unmatched space allows us to continue to give our clients the very best service imaginable by ensuring our entire staff is available in one place, and we are continuing to reimagine both our space and the experience we are providing,” Bonnie Brennan, president of Christie’s Americas operations, said in a statement.

Mary Ann Tighe, Ramneek Rikhy, Cara Chayet and Courtney Hughson of CBRE (CBRE) handled negotiations for Christie’s while EB Kelly and Blythe Kinsler represented Tishman Speyer in-house. 

“This new lease means that Christie’s has committed to a 50-year residency at the Center, from 1999 through 2049,” Tighe said in a statement. “Christie’s will be redesigning and rebuilding their entire premises, and CBRE’s Workplace team helped them envision how to adapt 20 Rock for the digital age. In the last 25 years, the auction business has been transformed and the negotiation centered on whether it was possible to reinvent the existing spaces to support the new way of doing business.”

Tighe, who worked on the original deal in 1998 with CBRE’s now-vice chairman Lewis Miller, said the deal blended retail, office and basement space and included major building system upgrades by the landlord.

The Christie’s space features limestone and bronze exteriors while the renewal aligns with a revitalization effort by Tishman Speyer to modernize the 1939 Art Deco landmark district, an effort which is set to wrap up later this year.

Other retail tenants at Rockefeller Center include Catbird, McNally Jackson, Todd Snyder, Alo Yoga, Tiffany & Co. and Lego.

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.