In fact there's something slightly old-fashioned about the offices, with lots of wood panelling in evidence. Brown insists that St Martins was not responsible for the décor - it took the office space back fully fitted from a former tenant - but it says something about the company that it has never followed the rest of the property herd with a flash Mayfair head office.

Brown points out that the company is actually 80 years old. "For the first 60 years it focused on the City of London," he says, "but then retail became a new focus with schemes in Walton-upon-Thames, Lichfield, Slough and then King's Mall in Hammersmith, which was London's first covered mall."

At the same time the company began to spread its wings internationally, with schemes across Europe and in Australia. St Martins was by then a key part of The Fund for Future Generations, under which Kuwait invested surplus oil revenues in other sectors to prepare for the day when the oil ran out.

The 1980s saw major shopping centre schemes in Newcastle, Northampton, Coventry and Croydon, but then the first Gulf War intervened and stopped the company's growth plans in their tracks.

Quite rightly, the Kuwaiti government's priority was to rebuild its own economy, and with the property sector slowly coming out of a major downturn it decided to put St Martins effectively on a 'care and maintenance' footing - looking after its existing assets but not taking on any major new projects.

It wasn't until the end of the 1990s that development returned to the agenda with Centrale, which saw the redevelopment of the second half of St Martins' substantial landholdings in Croydon.

Two years ago St Martins changed gear again. "The Fund for Future Generations reviewed its investment weightings, and decided it wanted to increase its exposure to property," Brown explains. "There's now support for us to grow, and we're expanding into new areas."

The first tangible sign of this came last year when St Martins bought the Plejada retail centre in Sosnowiec, Poland, from TK. This is a scheme of 101 units, anchored by a hypermarket, and there is planning permission to extend the retail offer by an additional 25 per cent.

"We're keen on Poland," says Brown. "We're looking at two more schemes and we've now got the corporate structure in place to do more there."

And at the end of last year St Martins marked its return to the big time with the $750m purchase of Europe's largest shopping centre, Cevahir in Istanbul. The centre opened at the end of 2005 with 320 units across six stories together with a large leisure element.

"We focus on big, dominant assets and we hold them for the long term, especially if we're breaking into a new market," Brown explains. "We identified Turkey as part of our global investment strategy because it has a huge - and young - population and we've gone for precisely the big dominant asset we like. It's got a very good tenant mix - Debenhams is one of the anchors along with Next and Inditex - and it's in the city centre with direct links to the metro."

The received wisdom is that Turkey is one of those markets best approached through a local joint venture partner. But significantly St Martins decided to go it alone. "We prefer to operate alone," says Brown. "Everything we have is wholly owned with the exception of a joint venture in Melbourne which built the Rialto. At its time it was the tallest building in the southern hemisphere."

For Brown these two deals signified to the market that St Martins was back: "The acquisitions are a signal of our desire and determination to seek out good quality investments in maturing and emerging markets, not only across Europe but on a global basis," he says.

To implement this new investment strategy Brown was asked to look at St Martins' internal structure. His first move was to appoint an in-house research capability. Management, on the other hand, has gone the other way.

"We outsourced the day-to-day management of our UK portfolio to CBRE and now, after a tender process, they're also doing France," says Brown. That process saw 150 people transferred from St Martins to CBRE.

"We've become a lean organisation and we want to stay that way," Brown insists. "The investors wanted us to focus on really driving the portfolio so although we're now a smaller team we're actually handling a lot more than we were."

He pays generous tribute to the way St Martins' staff have handled what he describes, with some understatement, as "a period of significant change". He believes that "people have adapted very well in the company. They're out there trying to drive things forward."

As for sector allocation, St Martins' aim is to diversify away from offices by increasing retail exposure. And Brown certainly does not rule out more activity in the UK. "We've been looking, and there's certainly more about. But the board is concerned over where yields might go and about growth expectations," he says. "There's a feeling that in some markets yields have moved too far. There could certainly be a correction in the secondary market."

Asked to describe his ideal investment location, he says: "We focus on areas where you can see values being maintained. For instance, we looked at Bucharest but there are new malls opening left, right and centre. We like places where rents are affordable for retailers."

With this in mind Asia would be an obvious target. "We had a look at a mall in Kuala Lumpur but there are question marks over market saturation there," Brown says. "Now we're looking at a mall in China but the rules on foreign investment are changing after they saw overseas investors making excessive profits. How you structure a deal there will now be the key."

Brown is keeping a close eye on international retailers' plans in China. "There's not yet the product in terms of mall space that they'd like to trade from," he says. "To attract the international brands you have to build to international standards."

He's fully aware that China involves an element of risk. "In China you don't start leasing a mall until you've topped out. That's partly because rents have been growing so fast that developers have been afraid of missing out on that growth. So there's a higher risk but also a higher upside. The weight of our core portfolio in the UK means we can carry an element of risk elsewhere. We've improved the quality of the UK portfolio so it's as risk-free as property can be."

Diversification will now be St Martins' watchword. "Operating in a global market allows us to take advantage of different cycles," Brown explains. "For instance, Australia was the best-performing market last year: Perth saw 75 per cent rental growth. There's always some part of the portfolio that's doing better and that balances out those areas that aren't doing so well."

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