Hennebique Studios on Dame Lane in Dublin 2 is buzzing.  

Technology workers gather around a pristine barista coffee machine. An informal meeting among twenty and thirty-somethings starts around a long wooden table flanked by high stools; it is the sort of interaction and collaboration that just doesn’t happen across a video screen. 

Robert ‘Bob’ Manson waits patiently for his turn to make me a cup of coffee along with Thomas Lenehan on the ground floor of the building.

It is a wonderful property with a storied history. Built in 1906, it was previously Hely’s Printworks, the workplace of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was subsequently refurbished and named after the French engineer François Hennebique; its reinforced concrete construction is now beautifully exposed.

Today, the building is part of Pembr, the thriving serviced office group co-owned by Manson and Lenehan that stretches across 22 buildings in the heart of Dublin. In the last 18 months, it has opened four new high-spec buildings on St Stephens Green, Wicklow Street, Baggot Street and Dame Lane where we are meeting.

Clients include some of the best-known names in business like Shein, Expedia, Click Up, Significant Health, Rippling, Temu and Munich-Re. It was the base of Irish fintech Wayflyer in its early years and is the current home of XtremePush, one of Ireland’s fastest-growing tech companies.

In total, the company manages more than 2,500 workstations for Irish and multinational companies. The business was previously called Pembroke Hall reflecting its origins managing only Georgian buildings that were once part of the Pembroke Estate. 

Pembr has since expanded into more modern buildings while remaining in Dublin’s central business district in Dublin 2, prompting the rebrand which is launched today. It owns some of its buildings and manages others for their owners. 

I am meeting Manson and Lenehan to hear their story so far and where they want to go next. It is a story they’ve never told publicly before. It begins decades earlier and looks far into the future as the business re-bands as Pembr and continues to grow.

Start-ups and standards

Manson and Lenehan first met when they were 15 years of age in boarding school. Their second names were near to each other alphabetically so they ended up in the same class. 

“We hit it off as pals,” Manson said. “We roomed together and later shared a flat together [in Dublin].” Manson studied law in UCD before spending six years at Arthur Cox and two years working with a communications agency called Cordiant Communications Group, the parent of Saatchi & Saatchi, which took him to Romania, Argentina and New York.

Lenehan studied marketing in the College of Marketing and initially joined his family business, a Dublin-based hardware and DIY store chain. This exposed him to restoration, design, and sales – all skills that would later prove valuable in running Pembr. 

Manson’s legal training and experience in international business gave him complementary but different skills. Both friends wanted to start their own business, and they’d often exchange ideas but then a chance came to team up. “An opportunity came up to do a building in 2007,” Manson said. “We’re both entrepreneurial, so we took a couple of buildings on Fitzwilliam Square, and that’s where it all started.” 

The buildings were both Georgian and in a central location at 38/39 Fitzwilliam Square. Insurance giant Aon was leaving the adjoining buildings to move to a new modern headquarters so the building was going to lie vacant. “They had a number of years left to run on a lease, so we took it over and made a bit of a go of it,” Manson said. 

Regus had floated on the London Stock Market seven years earlier so the concept of serviced offices was known; however, it was still only embryonic in a Dublin that was in the middle of a property boom. 

The year after Manson and Lenehan took on their first buildings, this bubble burst and Ireland went into a deep recession. “We opened just as the market sank,” Lenehan said. “Luckily we had signed up a couple of great companies.” 

One of them was Huawei, the Chinese mobile phone giant, which stayed with them for nine years. The support of these early tenants allowed Lenehan and Manson to survive. But it was only in 2014 that they felt ready to expand by adding another Georgian building to their portfolio on Pembroke Street Upper. “I’d just come back from summer holidays and walked into Bob, and Bob said ‘Thomas, you won’t believe it, we’ve got nine enquiries’,” Lenehan recalled.

Up until then, they’d been lucky to get one enquiry a month for serviced office space. “It was really slow during the recession,” Lenehan remembered. “Office take-up was slow. The property bubble burst was terrible… but then it changed quite quickly. We started in earnest then to build, opening our second building and concentrating at first on the Georgian core. We opened building after building after building as we kept our foot on the pedal to where we are now.” 

As their business grew, they incubated a new wave of American multinationals, which would fuel the Irish economic recovery. “We had companies like Shutterstock, Toast, and Sojern,” Lenehan said. 

Each of these firms started small before expanding, using Pembr’s flexible offering. Pembr has a fixed monthly fee with no additional extras.

Toast, a restaurant technology firm, started with just four workstations in 2016 and kept growing. “They went up to 20 workstations and then moved into a new building we did on Clarendon Street in 2018. Ultimately we moved them into Ballast House (on Westmoreland Street) and after five years they had 220 workstations with us,” according to Lenehan.

At that stage, Toast was ready to take on its own office. “For five years we gave them the flexibility they needed to grow,” Lenehan said. “There are over 500 US tech companies in Dublin now so we believe the scope is there for us to grow more.”

Manson said about 60 per cent of his firm’s tenants were from the tech sector, but that pharma and professional services were two other big areas. “Georgian buildings have nice, wide mid-sized rooms. They offer a mix of four to eight-person offices that can be combined,” he said. “We started to identify more buildings and then fill them reasonably quickly,” he said. 

Another crucial win was helping the IDA convince GoFundMe, the world’s biggest crowdfunding platform, to choose Dublin. “A key thing for them was that we could deliver in terms of service and flexible terms,” Manson said. “They expected high standards and we could meet them.”

Navigating a pandemic

In 2018, Pembr took its first step outside the Georgian core of Dublin after building up a portfolio of about 20 buildings overlooking or near Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square in the heart of the city. 

“The changing profile of our client base, the greater demands that we had from existing clients that we had incubated in Georgian space for bigger floor plates and stuff like that influenced that decision,” Manson said. 

The first new location was on Clarendon Street, between Ireland’s main shopping street on Grafton Street and the bars and nightlife of South William Street. “It was client-led really,” Manson said. “We’d three clients – all US tech companies – who came to us at the same time and said they were expanded and needed bigger floor plates. We showed them Clarendon Street and they loved it. So we decided to go for it together.” 

After Clarendon Street, they took over Ballast House in 2019. The combination of being able to offer businesses flexible workspace from a handful to hundreds of people proved a winning one. “We start small and stay with businesses as they grow. We develop a great trust with our companies – the relationship part of our business is massive,” Lenehan said. 

This stood to Pembr when the pandemic came overnight, causing an unprecedented shock to the office market. “It was a case of communicating with all of our clients and saying: ‘Look we’re all in this together. Let’s try and manage our way through’,” Manson said. 

Pembr invested heavily in making its buildings Covid-19 safe. Certain sectors were allowed to go into the office still, so Pembr focused on ensuring they could do so at minimum risk as it waited for the pandemic to ease. Despite the crisis, occupancy stayed above 75 per cent. 

“It was really remarkable,” Lenehan recalled. “There were some companies who did leave as they ran out of cash flow but we tried to support them all. Many came back and the bounce-back when things opened up was much quicker than we expected. 

“We felt (post Covid-19) the demand for flexible office space was going to be greater so we expanded again, taking on new sites like St Stephen’s Green.” Pembr grew its size by about a third as it invested after the pandemic in its belief that people wanted flexible working options in the city centre. As it did so, the two co-founders began to think about its name.

“As our business evolved and our identity became from not just doing Georgian buildings but also doing modern buildings we felt there was a disconnect between the name and the offer so we decided to rebrand as Pembr.” 

Manson started to talk with Lenehan about a rebrand and it became about more than just that. “Part of that conversation was not just about changing the name, but this was an opportunity to really have a deep dive into looking at ourselves and say, who are we as a company, what are we offering, what are the values, what do people say about us, what do we think about ourselves, how do we want to project ourselves.”

Indigenous success stories

Thomas Lenehan is a regular sea swimmer, and it was at the famous south Dublin swim spot the 40 Foot where he first met Tommy Kearns, the dynamic founder of XtremePush. “We got talking and Tommy mentioned he was looking for office space,” Lenehan said. 

Within a short time afterwards, he was a client, starting small and growing as his digital marketing business expanded rapidly and raised $33 million. “We believe American tech is going to stay in Ireland but it is important too to remember our own homegrown entrepreneurs,” Lenehan said. “It’s important to champion our own success stories too, and XtremePush is an unbelievable success.” 

XtremePush has taken 80 workstations in Pembr’s Clarendon Street office, and Lenehan said Irish firms were an important part of its client mix. “Ireland has matured a lot since we started in business,” Lenehan said. 

“The city has matured. Our tax regime is right. We’re very pro-business – there’s an awful lot of great things about Dublin.”

Pembr believes that while the commercial property market in general was under pressure because of rising interest rates and hybrid working this wouldn’t impact everyone in the same way. “We are talking to our clients all the time and we can see that many companies are mandating more in-office days. People want to go into great offices in great locations. There are so many pluses in terms of work and the social side of things too. We are really focused on giving people places to collaborate,” Manson said. 

“You saw how many were gathered outside having coffee – there is nothing like human interaction for generating new ideas.” 

Less central areas, he predicted, may suffer more.

“We don’t have anything outside Dublin 2,” Manson said. “We’ve been offered it but we’ve never done it. The demand is proven in Dublin 2. We want buildings that are in the middle of town – the central business district.”

Lenehan said occupancy rates were markedly higher in Dublin 2 than in other areas. “The periphery (of Dublin) is getting hit. There is a flight to quality. We have a company that has a big base on the outskirts of Dublin which nobody is going into. They have 80 places with us and it is being used as a hub by its team all the time because it is location, location, location,” he said.

“We own and run the business versus say WeWork which is in 60 countries and has 900,000 workstations. WeWork seems to have overspent and they have a lot of debt. It’s facing difficulties and challenges but the vision of WeWork is bang on. Flexibility is the future but they scaled too quickly.” 

“It’s a cliché but true,” Manson added. “People want to go to the office for the experience, interaction, great amenities, collaboration, and being in the city.” Manson noted that estate agent Savills Review 2023 concluded: “In times of uncertainty, companies tend to avoid long-term commitments and high capital expenditure in favour of more stabilised short-term commitments, sometimes at higher rents.”

There is competition in Dublin for serviced offices with WeWork, the financially under-pressure serviced office giant, having a significant presence here as does IWG, the owner of Regus. “We’re a much smaller business and we manage our debt very carefully,” Lenehan said. 

Manson added: “There’s a lot to play out for WeWork yet but the idea of flexibility and collaboration spaces is the right one.” 

Lenehan and Manson said their focus with Pembr was on sustainable growth in prime Dublin city centre locations. “We’re huge fans of Dublin 2,” Lenehan said. “We love it, we live it, we always have. We’ve always lived in Dublin 2. People want to come in and work in our buildings. A lot of what they come in for is the buzz of the city. Dublin is a vibrant city. If you’re out in the suburbs you could be anywhere.”

Manson agreed. “Companies look for convenient locations, flexibility, great services, high-speed broadband and so on. Service levels have to deliver on their promise from the outset. The other thing about our buildings is they have great character. Two of them feature in Ulysses: the one we’re in now and also Ballast House.” 

On the corner of Aston Quay and Westmoreland Street, Ballast House has a rooftop garden with stunning views of the city. “We like remarkable buildings,” Manson said. ESG he said was also important. Hennebique Studios, he said, was built to the highest standards. “There are no car parking spaces, just bikes. From an ESG point of view, it ticks a lot of boxes.’

Despite its expansion, Pembr is careful not to take on too much. “Managing risk is key,” Manson said. “We’re very cautious about what we want to take on,” Lenehan added. “ Some of the buildings we are offered are just a little bit off the beaten path for us.  We’re very definite about where we want to be.”

He said that while there might be oversupply in certain types of office space, the market will recover in time. “There are a lot of buildings due to be finished this year but there’s very little in planning for 2026. I expect the market will start to come back next year, and continue to in 2025. Anyone predicting the end of the office is wrong.”

“We’re invested in upgrading all our collaboration spaces and creating places where people love to work. We want them to want to come in and feel looked after, feel welcomed and enjoy being in a great European city.”

This article is in partnership between Pembr and The Currency. To find out more about Pembr, click here.