By RACHEL BROWN
The months-long renovation of Century City’s only shopping center has been an exercise in patience, with relocated stores, reduced parking, double-parked dump trucks and nonstop construction noise cutting into the shopping experience.
It could be what’s in store for Santa Ana’s Westfield Shoppingtown MainPlace mall.
Australia’s Westfield Group, which owns the Century City and Santa Ana malls, is looking to make over its 10 Southland shopping centers.
Century City is the model for what Westfield dubs a “hy-style” mall, where department stores place second to entertainment, restaurants and specialty retailers.
If all goes well at Westfield Century City,the “Shoppingtown” name has been dropped,Westfield plans to take the hy-style concept to its other malls, including MainPlace.
“It is something that we are doing to differentiate from our competitors, and it is something that we are looking at to roll out to the rest of our centers,” said Paul Kurzawa, Westfield’s vice president of management.
Westfield Century City’s first phase makeover is set to wrap up next month with the opening of a second-floor dining terrace,a gussied up replacement for the center’s tired food court that will feature indoor and outdoor seating and real silverware instead of the plastic stuff.
The following month, just in time for the holiday movie season, comes a 15-screen AMC theater with stadium seating, digital technology and surround sound that will replace a 14-screen lower-tech multiplex in another portion of the mall.
Already, Westfield Topanga in Canoga Park is being renovated and expanded, and plans are being readied to make over Westfield Fox Hills. The price tag for all three centers is around $600 million, with many more millions to renovate the other properties.
Westfield has talked about renovating MainPlace but hasn’t come out with specific plans yet.
There are skeptics, among them Elliot Mahn, owner of Agoura Hills-based Potatoes Potatoes Potatoes, which runs Century City’s California Crisp location. He said shoppers don’t think about the Westfield brand when they go into a mall. And amenities like fancy forks aren’t the reason people choose to eat there, he said.
But Westfield’s willingness to invest so much speaks volumes about the fundamental transition taking place in retailing. With department stores consolidating and so-called lifestyle centers like the Grove drawing away customers with their specialty retailers and movie theaters, more traditional centers must keep up by providing many things to many shoppers,or at least trying to.
That includes changing the mix. At Westfield Topanga, where renovations began earlier this year and are scheduled to be mostly complete by the fall of 2006, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus will be adding stores, as will Target.
Like other mall operators, Westfield is trying store juxtapositions that were unheard of when department stores ruled the mall experience. At Irvine Spectrum Center, Target is set to open near Nordstrom next year.
“Target is a wonderful addition,” said Greg Stoffel, a shopping center consultant with Irvine-based Stoffel & Associates. “That combination (of Target and Nordstrom) works more and more. People wouldn’t have tried it five years ago.”
Opportunity has influenced many of the makeovers, starting with Federated Department Stores Inc.’s acquisition of May Department Stores Co., which is leading to the store closures.
“What has actually refocused a lot of these projects is the fact that the department store merger has given back property,” said John Goodwin, a vice president of development at Westfield.
Westfield, publicly traded in Australia, is the largest mall operator in the world, with 129 centers in four countries,68 of those in the U.S. and 42 in Australia. The estimated worth of the U.S. portfolio is $15.2 billion. In 2002, Westfield was in a group that acquired Rodamco North America’s U.S. properties in a $5.3 billion deal that netted Westfield 14 centers, including MainPlace and Century City.
The company was started inauspiciously enough in the late 1950s when Frank Lowy opened a deli in western Sydney with partner John Saunders. With that business thriving, the two purchased the surrounding land and developed the first Westfield shopping center.
Lowy remains chairman of Westfield and members of his family take key roles in the company. His son Peter Lowy sits on the board and is managing director.
The company has a tendency to acquire malls regionally. That way, it can brand centers to create a distinct Westfield identity that’s supposed to attract shoppers even when rival centers are nearby.
That approach was behind the Shoppingtown tag, which was placed on centers across Westfield’s portofolio. Except the name hasn’t really worked.
“Shoppingtown kind of just made for long, difficult project names,” said Rob York, a principal with retail consultancy Fransen Co. in Santa Monica. “It didn’t ring true with a more cosmopolitan customer base.”
That was the case at Century City, where an affluent mix of residential and office tenants are luring high-end retailers willing to fork over higher rents.
“Rent is always a function of opportunity,” said Valerie Richardson, vice president of real estate for the Container Store Inc.
The Dallas-based chain needed 25,000 square feet to locate at the mall, a space requirement that prohibited it from entering Century City prior to the remodel. With the renovation, it’s set to open next year.
All told, 30 new stores are slated to open at Century City, lifting the mall’s yearly sales to $400 million from the current $300 million, according to Kurzawa.
Shoppers just want to eat and shop at the most convenient and best places, according to Stoffel. After all, he said, South Coast Plaza isn’t the most beautiful shopping center, but it always is a top performer.
“Of all the centers I have seen across the U.S., three quarters of them look better than South Coast Plaza, but no one has a tenant mix better than that in Southern California,” he said. “That is what really matters.”
Brown is a staff writer with the Los Angeles Business Journal.
