Upscale Experience, Downscale Prices examines trends in retailing, including the emergence of lifestyle centers — which I’ve been naively calling outdoor malls:
Open-air pedestrian walkways, dozens of small merchants, no large anchor store. Developers are embracing this format, known as the lifestyle center, as the replacement for outdated enclosed malls.‘There isn’t going to be this one super-regional mall model that everyone’ constructs, says Mr. Stanek. ‘Consumers have said that rather than going into a one-million-square-foot mall, they’re more interested in getting to specific stores.’
The International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade association, says there are currently 132 lifestyle centers in the U.S. that total nearly 50 million square feet. That’s still small next to the 951 million square feet of enclosed mall space in the U.S. Still, more than 60% of the lifestyle-center square footage has opened since 2000. And 52 more lifestyle centers — totaling 7.3 million square feet — are under construction, according to the council.
Developers often build lifestyle centers in upper-income communities where older, upscale shoppers will be drawn to typical lifestyle-center tenants: Williams-Sonoma, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Gap, Bath & Body Works, Pottery Barn and Victoria’s Secret.
Taking the trend a step further, some developers are building so-called retail districts — which combine office, retail, residential and open spaces — on the sites of demolished older malls. Continuum Partners’ Belmar development in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, Colo., proposes one million square feet of retail space in the lifestyle-center format, 900,000 square feet of office space, nine acres of parks and 1,300 homes. Belmar would sit on the 104-acre site of Lakewood’s former Villa Italia Mall.
‘Once the retailers learn they can survive without the department store,’ says Mark Falcone, Continuum’s CEO, ‘they move into more unconventional formats like these multilevel retail districts.’