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Shopping Centers Today -> February 2002
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STANFORD CENTER GETS A RENOVATION CUM LAUDE
By Donna Mitchell
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| The mall now boasts one of the largest Pottery Barn stores in the United States. |
Stanford University is known as a place where high achievers strive to better themselves, so why should its super-regional shopping center be any different?
The university-owned Stanford Shopping Center, in Palo Alto, Calif., has completed an expansion and renovation that will keep the 45-year-old center competitive against newer, ambitious projects under way in the Silicon Valley. Two new centers in particular are within 15 miles: Santana Row, San Jose, Calif., a mixed-use development pegged as an urban village, is slated to open in August with retail, hotel, residential and office components. And Westfield Shoppingtown Valley Fair, in Santa Clara, a 1.1 million-square-foot, super-regional center under development by Westfield America, Los Angeles, is headed for a spring completion date. The first phase of Westfield’s $165 million expansion is scheduled to open in March.
“We had to reassert ourselves as the focal point of the Silicon Valley,” said David Longbine, SCSM/CLS, Stanford Shopping Center’s director. In the past the mall has dominated the market, and its owners want to keep it that way, he said. “We are the gathering place — certainly for shopping.”
Stanford Shopping Center is an open-air, super-regional center comprising 14 one-story buildings, sitting on 70 acres abutting the north end of the university. It boasts eight full-service restaurants, patios and pedestrian walkways where visitors can stroll and socialize while enjoying park-like landscaping. It has four anchors: Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Originally built in 1956 by the university, the center was expanded once before, in 1977, said Longbine.
California residents don’t just gather at Stanford Shopping Center; they spend lots of money there, too: Nonanchor sales per square foot were at $725 in 2001, and reached $775 the year before; the dip is due to heavy job losses in the Silicon Valley inflicted by the recession and the dot-com bust, Longbine explained.
Stanford Management Co., the university arm that owns the shopping center, has added three buildings and nine new stores, totaling 80,000 square feet of space. To ease traffic congestion, it also has built a 1,500-space parking deck. The company updated the look of the center by replacing the dated smoked Plexiglas awnings with more elegant glass ones and improved the paving with a stonework tapestry that incorporates limestone and quartz. It also installed lighting along the pedestrian walkways.
Stanford Shopping Center now contains one of the largest Pottery Barn stores in the United States. Other new stores include Talbots; Coldwater Creek; Furla, which sells Italian luxury leather goods; BCBG Max Azria; Cartier; and Coach.
The expansion is part of a $350 million plan by the university to better connect the institution to major local thoroughfares and ease vehicular gridlock. (Nearby it is adding about 328 rental units for faculty and students.) The mall’s portion of that tab is estimated at $40 million.
The Stanford University Endowment is funding the entire project, for which work began in 1990.
Improvements on Stanford Shopping Center won’t stop with the expansion, which was completed in December; Longbine said the center will be adding another 11 stores this year. Consequently, its newly arrived mall competitors will feel the heat, he said. “It clearly keeps us as the dominant center in the valley.”
 | Current Issue November 2008 |