Newport Beach resident Athena Kasparoff, shopping bags and a long-time sales consultant in tow, perused the latest offerings from Bailey44, a Los Angeles-based brand usually found at better department stores in upscale retail centers.
Except this wasn’t South Coast Plaza or Fashion Island, or anyplace in L.A.—Kasparoff was strolling the renovated Lido Marina Village, a waterfront collection of stores and eateries selected by DJM Capital Partners with a “laid-back-luxe” vibe in mind.
“I do a lot of shopping in Los Angeles, and we needed this type of boutique environment here—very small, very exclusive—and they have top-quality designers,” Kasparoff said. “I feel like I’m in the Palisades.”
San Jose-based DJM, the developer behind Pacific City and Bella Terra outdoor shopping centers in Huntington Beach, is putting the final touches on 125,000 square feet of previously nearly vacant retail, office and warehouse space off Via Oporto in Newport Beach, nestled off Newport Boulevard before the Balboa Peninsula.
A launch party is set for next month.
San Francisco-based Marine Layer earlier this month announced that it will become the newest tenant, joining 16 others, including attention-getters such as the first West Coast store for Miami-based intimate apparel brand Eberjey and Pacific Palisades-based retailer Elyse Walker, in a 12,000-square-foot space that features a hair salon and a fine jewelry vault along with merchandise from Gucci, Balenciaga and other high-end labels.
Los Angeles-based designer Jenni Kayne set up shop a couple of months ago—her fifth store—and offers a mix of apparel, footwear and handmade household goods.
“Newport Beach has such a dreamy, relaxed vibe and I love that the store has that same feel,” Kayne wrote on her blog last month. “Bleached wooden platforms, which showcase home objects and accessories, and white wood paneling on the walls give everything a clean, spacious feel. My collection, along with some finds from my favorite brands like Acne and The Great, neatly line the walls. It’s like walking into a Newport Beach dream closet; complete with spare leather totes, luxurious cashmere knits, and perfect blue jeans.”
Sausalito-based furniture and home décor brand Serena & Lily—which has stores in San Francisco, East Hampton, Los Angeles and Westport, Conn.—will open next month.
“We look for unique locations that have just great energy,” said Lori Greeley, chief executive of Serena & Lily. “The space we’re going into, in a former life, it was a car dealership, so it has an interesting space and architecture. Our most recent store in Westport that opened earlier this year is in a Queen Anne house.”
The brand also is “all about connecting with interior designers in the community, as well as creating a space where the amateur interior designer can come and dream, sort of a hands-on approach to interior design,” Greely said. “We know that the Newport Beach customer is very interested in (having) a beautiful home and our optimistic colorful textiles—that’s what made us come there.”
Restaurants
Restaurants include Oregon-inspired Honor Coffee Roasters, offering specialty coffee and pastries, and a couple of entries from L.A. are in the works—including popular sushi place Nobu and Zinque, a French bistro.
The food thrills Kasparoff as much as the apparel.
“I’ve been here my whole life, and this area needed to be rebuilt,” she said. “It was just nonfunctioning, an area that had boats and really no high-end restaurants. They’re bringing elegance and a great feel—it’s casual and yet high-end. So it’s wonderful.”
Strategy
DJM acquired Lido Marina Village in 2012 from Vornado Realty Trust in New York for an undisclosed amount. Los Angeles-based real estate investment firm George Smith Partners assessed its value at $73.1 million in 2014, when it issued a $53.4 million loan to DJM to redevelop the property. The project encompassed a 47-boat slip marina, a 372-space parking structure, and 14 one- and two-story standalone buildings designated for retail, restaurant and office use.
“When we started this project we thought ‘Oh, it’s got a lot of charm, we can just kind of paint it and do a few things and it’ll be fabulous’—you know, the famous last words,” said Chief Marketing Officer Linda Berman. “Then you get into it, you start opening up the walls of a place that’s languished as long as it did before we bought it, and you realize that it’s far more complex than you ever thought to bring it up to today’s standards and meet the standards of the kind of tenants that obviously we have here. Yes, we’ve probably spent a lot more [time and money] than we thought … but I think the results have definitely been worth it.”
Lylian Ngyuen, manager at Bailey44 apparel boutique, a 10-year-old brand that opened its own store in July, said Lido Marina Village is becoming a shopping spot for many of her former clients—including Kasparoff—whom she knows from prior stints at Bloomingdale’s in Fashion Island and Saks Fifth Avenue at South Coast Plaza.
“This is like you’re sitting on a gold mine,” Ngyuen said. “What our CEO likes is that [Lido management] wants to create more of a trendy shopping experience with stores you would not find at any major shopping center in Orange County. All the stores here are coming from L.A.”
DJM’s Berman said Lido Marina Village has “found a niche that was different, clearly unique and people are responding to it.”
“There’s no question that there’s great retail in Orange County,” she said. “As fabulous as both Fashion Island and South Coast Plaza are—and God knows I shop both of those shopping centers myself—there is something about this place that does feel very different and we have been fortunate enough that these retailers have responded to Lido the way they have.”
Film Forthcoming
Berman’s vision for Lido is reflected in its leasing brochures and advertising materials, which she describes as “very beautiful,” with “a very lush, sexy point of view.”
She plans to screen a 15-minute film, “Setting Sail, Setting Style,” created by Verité Studios in Santa Barbara about Lido and its merchants during the launch party next month.
“It’s about Elyse Walker and Alex Faherty and Clare Vivier and Steven Allen, the people behind these concepts who have their own particular notions of style and what is classic and how they create that for their customers, how they edit for their customers,” Berman said. “These are merchants who are not interested in necessarily offering the most, but they are interested in offering the best.”
