It has two fireplaces, one big enough to drive a car through–if you ignore the billowing flames–with a chimney rising 60 feet in red limestone slabs to a slatted wood roof.
Under the soaring ceiling, opened to natural light with clerestory windows and skylights, is a 700-seat dining area with wooden chairs and tables like some sumptuous summer camp refectory, where extended families gather in groups to eat food from the restaurant court counters that line the perimeter.
Not far away, a slope of faux boulders mounts two stories, surrounded by murals of Colorado landscapes and occasionally wreathed with mist exhaled from inside the rocks.
Guards dressed as park rangers patrol along natural wood and marble aisles, plush chairs and benches with Western-style designs provide niches for cozy chats, and the scent of pine fills the air.
“We don’t even like to call it the m-a-l-l word,” said Chicago architect Anthony Belluschi, who designed the center. “It’s more of a hospitality kind of resort.”
But, as you can tell from the 7,000 parking spaces outside and the names on the doors inside–Nordstrom, Dillard’s, Foley’s, to name a few–it is indeed a shopping mall.
Park Meadows, located in unincorporated Douglas County a few minutes outside the city limits of Denver, in fact, represents the latest mantra in shopping mall design–the creation of an experience rather than merely a place to shop.
Belluschi is also designing the atrium and arcade that will provide the Michigan Avenue entrance to John Buck Co.’s Bridge North project, attempting to marry old and new on the Mag Mile, incorporating the re-created facade of the doomed 1920s-vintage McGraw-Hill building.
The high-design trend stems partly from changes roiling the retail industry during the 1990s. Consumers have more places to shop–from “big box” discounters and factory outlet centers to television and the Internet–but less time to shop.
The average number of mall visits by mall shoppers has been trending downward since the late 1980s, from 3.7 per month in 1989 to 3 per month in 1997, according to Indianapolis-based Stillerman Jones & Co., a mall consulting and market research firm.
The time spent per visit has also declined from 90 minutes in 1982 to 73 minutes last year, though that latter figure is up from only 66 minutes in 1996, the firm said. Shopper expenditures per visit also endured a long flat period until consumer confidence, swelled by a buoyant economy, caused a recent upturn.
Such figures have had mall owners searching for the magic appeal that will get consumers in the doors and keep them there. One aspect of that effort has been the race to put more movie screens, restaurants, virtual reality arcades and other entertainment venues in malls.
The other is dazzling design.
In design, Park Meadows has become a recognized national star since it opened in 1996, winning a prestigious award from the Urban Land Institute, a national, Washington-based group of developers, architects, planners and others in the commercial building industry.
“It’s fabulous, just stunning . . . a killer,” said Burland East, a real estate analyst with Chicago-based Everen Securities, who is not usually dewy-eyed about retail projects. “It’s a higher end mall . . . where you can shop for higher-end merchandise and feel like you’ve had an experience.”
It’s not uncommon for mall officials to give tours to owners of other malls looking for ideas, said Park Meadows marketing director Janet Beaudry.
“This is truly a catalyst for the next generation of what’s happening in our industry,” she said.
The other mall operators aren’t beguiled mainly by aesthetics, of course, but by Park Meadow’s financial success. In its first year the mall made $415 a square foot in sales, putting it among the top grossers in the industry, where the average was $312 a square foot in 1997 for the biggest regional malls.
Mall general manager Pam Schenk estimated that shoppers spend twice as much time at Park Meadows as the average mall, though the first shopper survey on that issue hasn’t been completed yet. (She said her estimate was based on the fact that shoppers there use twice as much toilet paper and hand towels as the industry average.)
The 1.6 million-square-foot mall, which was developed at an initial cost of $164 million by Toronto-based TrizecHahn Corp., was recently sold to Rouse Co. of Columbia, Md., along with six other malls for $550 million, which industry analysts said was a premium price.
While Park Meadows is clearly a hit, it’s not certain that its “retail resort” concept could be transplanted to other parts of the country that aren’t naturally resort areas like the foothills of Colorado’s Front Range.
“Park Meadows would be very difficult to do in a lot of places,” said Bill Roop, president of Stillerman Jones. “I wonder whether the style would lend itself as well in Chicago or Pittsburgh.”
Belluschi insists that the concept of custom-crafting the design to fit a particular area will work anywhere–although he conceded that the Midwest has fewer picturesque elements to draw on than other parts of the country.
“If you can’t do it from something geographical or topographical, you can go to the history books and look at the local communities,” he said.
Belluschi said he’s designing a retail and entertainment complex in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area to resemble a Texas Hill Country ranch with a San Antonio building style.
Belluschi said his plans for the Michigan Avenue retail gallery will include an atrium as high as 90 feet whose design will blend traditional and contemporary Chicago styles, perhaps involving a specially commissioned wire and glass sculpture inside.
The atrium, intended as public space, will adjoin and lead into the existing McGraw-Hill building, whose facade will be preserved or replicated as part of an agreement with the city.
“It will be the front door for the whole Bridge North project, a magical space,” said Belluschi, noting that the gallery will have a curving “European arcade” leading to both a new hotel and a Nordstrom department store.
The muted Art Deco style of the 1929 McGraw-Hill building will work with a 21st Century look, Belluschi added.
“It will be very durable and timeless in the urban, Chicago manner,” he said.
He contrasted that sumptuous style, harking back to classic retail palaces such as Marshall Field’s State Street store, with boxy shopping centers that were built in previous decades.
“Anyone could do one, as long as you had the (retail) anchors. All you needed was a cornfield and you could build these things with a low, minimal kind of impact,” he said.
Not everyone is enthralled with Belluschi’s vision of retail Rockies, however.
“It’s a totally ersatz version of Colorado–“Rocky Mountain High,” sneered Michael Leccese, a Boulder public relations consultant.
Such talk riles Belluschi.
“I don’t think it’s a caricature,” he snapped. “It’s made of honest materials–stone, wood, copper–and a lot of art. These things are intrinsically of value to everyone, and they look like they belong there.”
