San Francisco’s sleepy waterfront office towers are gearing up for a hotel-style glow-up. Owners of One Market Plaza and One Front Street have rolled out plans for a seventh-floor sky bar, new tenant lounges, high-end fitness centers, and ground-floor bars and restaurants, all in a bid to pull workers back into the Financial District and turn buttoned-up offices into all-day hangout hubs.
The overhaul is part of a roughly $250 million modernization push led by Rithm Capital’s newly rebranded Elecor Properties, which is targeting its marquee office buildings for amenity-heavy, hospitality-flavored upgrades. The idea is simple enough: swap out tired elevator lobbies and empty storefronts for spaces that feel more like a boutique hotel than a nine-to-five grind.
Elecor’s Plan for Both Towers
Rithm Capital announced that Paramount Group has officially rebranded as Elecor Properties and will deploy approximately $250 million in capital improvements across its New York and San Francisco portfolio, according to Business Wire.
At One Market Plaza, the company is planning a redesigned atrium and ground-floor experience, a new conferencing center, upgraded fitness facilities, an atrium bar, and a seventh-floor sky bar that will come with an executive lounge and rooftop deck. Over at One Front Street, Elecor is lining up a reimagined lobby with a café, bar, and restaurant, a second-floor amenity level that will feature a gym and conference spaces, plus modernized elevators to tie it all together.
When Tenants Will See the New Spaces
According to The SF Standard, Elecor representatives told local reporters that the seventh-floor terraces are expected to open to tenants by August. The conference center, gym, and renovated ground floor are slated to debut in the first half of 2027, with the rooftop sky bar targeted for 2028.
There is plenty of room to fill. One Market Plaza is currently about 67% occupied, leaving more than 600,000 square feet available, according to CoStar News. The hope is that upgraded amenities will help turn that vacancy into a selling point rather than a liability.
Why Landlords Are Leaning Hospitality
Across San Francisco, office landlords are quietly morphing into quasi-hotel operators, turning lobbies into bars, carving out terraces, and installing gyms as they jockey for tenants who now judge office space by experience, not just square footage. Elecor’s move has been framed in industry coverage as part of a broader repositioning of trophy assets, at a time when the owner-operator model is tightening the flow of fresh capital for large-scale retrofits, per GlobeSt.
The message to tenants is clear: if you are going to commute in, your office had better feel like more than just rows of desks and a break room.
Money, Mortgages and the Stakes
The timing behind all this polish is not accidental. Rithm took control of the portfolio last year and inherited significant debt on the complex. One Market Plaza alone carries a roughly $850 million mortgage that comes due in February, a clock that puts real pressure on leasing momentum, as reported by The SF Standard.
The renovation strategy is designed to support higher rents and cut vacancy at a property that was once nearly fully leased before the pandemic shook up downtown office demand. In other words, those sky bars and lounges are not just for fun, they are part of the financing story.
“We’re enhancing our buildings to continue delivering a modernized, differentiated experience,” Elecor’s head of real estate Peter Brindley said in the company’s announcement, underscoring the effort to make the city’s waterfront towers feel more like destinations than obligations, according to Business Wire.
Tenants can expect a phased rollout of the new amenities over the next two years as construction progresses and the towers slowly trade their old-school corporate vibe for something closer to a high-rise resort.
