If any Brooklyn office building could figure out how to beat the odds of a sluggish market, it was going to be the Refinery: 450,000 square feet of class A office space and high-end amenities inside the 19th-century brick landmark anchoring the Domino Sugar complex. It doesn’t hurt that the developer is Two Trees, which transformed Dumbo into its own unlikely office destination decades ago and spent the past decade investing billions in the Williamsburg waterfront.
But a year after opening, the Refinery was only about a quarter leased and, as of last summer, had gotten the total up to just over half, about 60 percent. Now, nearly four years in, Two Trees has announced that the Refinery is 90 percent leased, with the retail portion of the building fully leased. But it’s not exactly in the way it envisioned. Back then, in the early years of the return to office post-COVID, Two Trees bet on an anchor tenant. “A large creative company — someone whose employees want to be in Williamsburg or are already there — or a large corporate tenant who wants to make a statement,” Jeff Fischer, executive vice-president at CBRE, said at the time.
