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Two Trees Going Big With Domino Sugar Refinery Project
Push to lease 460,000 square feet comes as the Brooklyn office market shows signs of a slight turnaround from pandemic lows

Brooklyn is like the dog that didn’t bark.

All the ingredients were there to make New York City’s most populous borough its most desirable office market. It had an abundance of old industrial buildings just begging to be repositioned to accommodate creative office companies. It had a large and growing population of hipsters and kids just out of college ready to ride their bikes a short distance to those buildings. It had developers eager to build new buildings.

For many years now, it has had a manifest destiny as the home of a post-modern technology industry that just screams hip.

But for all the success the borough has had in attracting small startups and midsize companies, for years now it has been unable to land the “big fish” — the 100,000-square-foot-plus tenant whose very name would take Brooklyn to another level. Think of Brooklyn as the New York City headquarters of Facebook or Google or Amazon.

Few have believed in that vision more than Two Trees Management. The vehicle of David Walentas, Two Trees was the company that patiently curated the Dumbo district from 1980s through the early 2000s, turning a derelict neighborhood of obsolete factory buildings into a treasured destination for technology companies.

Two Trees, with Walentas’ son Jed leading the effort, was the company that won the rights to redevelop the old Domino Sugar plant on the Williamsburg waterfront — including the landmarked Refinery Building, referred to by the company as The Refinery at Domino, taking on the challenge of turning an old refinery filled with vats and lacking floors, and redoing it as an office building. As a designated city landmark, it could not be razed, so the developer had to literally put a state-of-the-art 21st century building inside the brick shell of a 19th-century factory.

The riverside site includes about 3,000 apartments, 600,000 square feet in total of offices, 6 acres of open space and parkland, as well as several retail installations.

Even though renovations had started many years after the site was last used for refining sugar, the building still smelled of raw cane when a reporter visited in the mid-2010s. The one floor it had, at the very bottom of the refinery, was sticky. Vats had to be blowtorched into pieces to fit through the doors.

David Lombino, Two Trees’ managing director for external affairs, put the price of the renovation at about $250 million, all paid by the development company. (There is a construction loan, but Lombino declined to identify the lender.) The conversion is expected to be completed next year.


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Two Trees intends to employ a horticulturalist, who will be responsible for the flora both outside in Domino Park and also inside the refinery building. The developers envision space between the windows of the offices and the original vaulted windows of the outer building that will be largely filled up with plants, giving all who work there a sense of greenery surrounding them.

The 12-story original building will be topped by a new barrel-shaped glass-enclosed penthouse that could become communal party space, or be made for private use by an anchor tenant. Underneath, there will be two entirely new floors. Outside, the historic Domino Sugar sign, once on a silo that has since been torn down, will sit in front of the glass penthouse, facing the bridge. Lombino said the opportunity for an anchor tenant to put its own sign on the roof can be negotiated.

If there’s one development group capable of succeeding in leasing up the Refinery Building, it is Two Trees because of its deep knowledge of Brooklyn’s office market. And it had a philosophy of mixing office and residential uses, making the areas it was developing more appealing for both.

“I would never bet against the Walentases,” said Timothy King, managing partner of CPEX Real Estate, which controls the Liberty View Plaza, a former industrial building now leased to multiple retail tenants. “They are absolute geniuses.”

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https://commercialobserver.com/2022/...-leasing-cbre/