CANOPY Signs Full-Building Lease in San Francisco

Boutique coworking and flexible office provider CANOPY has signed a full-building lease with the Presidio Trust for 102 Montgomery St., an approximately 40,000-square-foot historic building in San Francisco’s Presidio. The new location is expected to open in spring of 2027.

Designer Yves Behar and his firm, fuseproject, will complete a custom buildout for CANOPY across three floors and the basement of the building. Amenities will include four suites with embedded conference rooms, private offices, two board rooms, shared kitchens on every floor, a café and a small gym room.

Built in 1896, the building is the last historic brick structure on the Presidio’s Main Post to be restored and activated. The building served the National Park Service from 1993 to 2001 as the Presidio’s planning and transition offices, with a visitor center on the ground floor. This was the period when the Presidio was starting to transition from a military base to a national park site.

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After a period of vacancy, the building underwent an 18-month rehabilitation by the Presidio Trust to bring it back to life for modern use while preserving its historic character. That work included structural upgrades by Holmes Structural Engineers, who applied fiber-reinforced polymer to the interior masonry walls, resulting in upgraded seismic performance. The project did not significantly reduce leasable square feet, a Presidio Trust spokesperson told Commercial Property Executive.

The perimeter walls of the basement were also lined with reinforced shotcrete on new foundations. In addition, the upper floors were all structurally tied to the newly reinforced perimeter walls.

In its original 1896 state, 102 Montgomery St., formerly known as Building 102, was a barracks for two companies of the Fifth U.S. Artillery Regiment. It and identical nearby barracks offered such amenities for the era as indoor plumbing, heating, mess halls, kitchens, reading rooms, barber shops and tailor shops.

Founded in 1996, the Presidio Trust is the federal agency that stewards the Presidio, in partnership with the National Park Service and with support from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. The Trust sustains the Presidio by leasing homes and workplaces and offering visitor amenities.

The 1,500-acre Presidio is one of America’s most visited national park sites, located within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and adjacent to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

Booming by the Bay

Last October, CANOPY signed on to be one of the anchor tenants at The Spear, a former Class B San Francisco office building being renovated and expanded by Presidio Bay Ventures. The firm is transforming the 11-story building into a 13-story Class A workplace, which is scheduled to be completed by this fall.

Artificial intelligence continues to be the primary driver of office demand and leasing activity across San Francisco, according to a second-quarter report from Kidder Mathews. Office leasing accelerated through the first half of this year, with the city hitting seven straight quarters of more than 2.0 million square feet of leasing activity, including 3.6 million just in the second quarter.

Net absorption for the quarter was 830,000 square feet, a pace that could give the city’s office market its strongest annual performance since 2018, “signaling a market that has officially moved beyond stabilization and into the early stages of recovery,” Kidder Mathews reported.