Another office owner is pouring money into a D.C. building to court top-tier tenants.

Longtime D.C.-area owner Gould Property Co. is infusing $25M into a large-scale upgrade of 401 Ninth St. NW — a 440K SF mixed-use property in the East End — the company tells Bisnow. 

The project includes renovating the four-story lobby while adding a fitness and wellness center offshoot, revamping a two-level, 200-person conference center, and adding an indoor-outdoor penthouse amenity called The Solarium. Work began this month and is expected to be complete next fall. 

“It's going to change the experience that you're going to have from the moment you start approaching the building,” Gould Property Co. CEO Giacomo Barbieri told Bisnow. Barbieri, the grandson of founder Kingdon Gould Jr., took over as head of the 75-year-old company last year.

The renovation comes amid a rush of similar projects from owners, new and old, vying to take advantage of tenants searching for top-tier space amid a paucity of supply. 

D.C.’s trophy market is the second-tightest in the nation, behind Manhattan, according to CBRE’s midyear report. The city’s 14M SF of trophy product — defined as the 10% of buildings fetching the highest rents — has just 8.3% vacancy.

The market had just eight blocks of space bigger than 50K SF as of August, and none of them included a top floor. 

With the renovation of 401 Ninth, Gould is attempting to fill that gap. It has a significant amount of space coming available next year, including a top-down opportunity. 

“It’s well known that there's a very high demand for high-quality space, whether it's trophy or Class-A-plus-plus, but there's a very limited supply,” Barbieri said. “So we saw a very underserved part of the market, and we thought it was a great opportunity to take advantage of an asset we know very well because we built it.”

Gould co-developed 401 Ninth, formerly known as Market Square North, with Boston Properties, now BXP, in the early 2000s. BXP exited at the end of last year, giving Gould full ownership, Barbieri said. 

The building, which the company is rebranding as “401 on Ninth,” is 65.6% leased. It has a 175K SF contiguous top-of-the-building availability that can be made available by the third quarter of 2029. That space includes the 80K SF on the top two floors that law firm Troutman Pepper is vacating when it moves to a Pennsylvania Avenue building.

Barbieri said the firm is speaking with “blue chip” tenants, both law firms and corporations, about the space.

With the renovation, the company plans to add a 6,300 SF fitness and wellness center just off the upgraded lobby. It’s also expanding and enhancing the two-story conference center on the second and third floors, including a 100-person auditorium. 

The rooftop Solarium is set to include a landscaped terrace, lounge and catering kitchen. Barbieri said the penthouse level also has the capacity to accommodate a build-out for a private tenant where an ice machine, originally created for building cooling, currently resides. 

Gould’s project resembles many office renovations kicking off across the city, but it falls in a smaller category of private, family-owned companies taking hammers to long-held assets.

Grosvenor, the real estate company owned by the Duke of Westminster, and Ponte Gadea, the investment vehicle of Zara founder and billionaire Amancio Ortega, are doing similar overhauls of their White House-adjacent office buildings. The former is being revamped for law firm White & Case, which plans to take nearly the entire property at the end of 2028, and the latter has grand renovation plans as it nears a deal with law firm Simpson Thacher, Bisnow reported this summer.

Gould, which was founded in the 1950s, has a 15M SF development pipeline, according to its website. This summer, it broke ground on the downtown of Konterra, a 2,000-acre census-designated region between Beltsville and Laurel, Maryland, that Gould has owned and planned to develop since the early 1980s.

Also on the company’s docket are plans to build an office building at the CityCenterDC development downtown. Barbieri said Gould has “a lot of tenant interest” for that development on the site of a parking lot at 900 New York Ave. NW, and it is talking to similar tenants as it is for 401 on Ninth.