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LEGACY VILLAGE: A LIFESTYLE CENTER LIKE NO OTHER?

BY LEE KESSLER

Legacy Village, northeastern Ohio’s first lifestyle center, will have tenants not found at open-air centers elsewhere.

The trouble with lifestyle centers, says Mitchell Schneider, is that they are all starting to look alike, with the same retailers turning up in every one. But he is determined that no one is going to say that about Legacy Village, a lifestyle center he is building in the Cleveland suburb of Lyndhurst.

For instance, Legacy Village, which he says will be the first lifestyle center to open in northeastern Ohio, will not be home to the ubiquitous Williams-Sonoma. Instead there will be a Viking Culinary Arts Center, offering a cooking school and a store that sells professional culinary tools. Viking manufactures top-of-the-line stoves to chefs and affluent cooking buffs.

“We’ve got to have a more unique blend of retailers,” said Schneider, who is president of Beachwood, Ohio-based First Interstate Properties.

There will be no Barnes & Noble or Borders bookstores. Instead, Schneider is bringing in Joseph-Beth Booksellers, a small chain that operates six stores in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. For home and office furnishings and accessories, there will be Z Gallerie, which operates 47 stores in 13 states.

Legacy Village, which will comprise 586,000 square feet of retail and 19,000 square feet of office space, is going up directly across the street from the 1.2 million-square-foot Beachwood Place Mall, The Rouse Co.’s high-end center that has a Nordstrom and a Saks Fifth Avenue.

“Between Legacy Village and Beachwood, we’re going to have the best collection of high-end retailers between Chicago and New York,” Schneider said. There are 490,000 people in the primary trading area, whose average household income of $82,000 makes it one of the highest-earning demographic markets in the state, he said.

Schneider has selected stores that he says will get the attention of these affluent shoppers, explaining that he’ll always want at least half his retailers to have Legacy Village as their only northeast Ohio location.

Of the 23 tenants signed up at press time, 10 are making their debut in the region. These first-time retailers are Crate & Barrel; Expo Design Center, a one-stop interior design store operated by The Home Depot; Galyan’s Trading Company; Viking Culinary Arts and Z Gallerie. Among the debuting restaurant tenants will be Brio Tuscan Grille; California Pizza Kitchen; The Cheesecake Factory; the Claddagh Irish Pub, which operates seven bars, most of them elsewhere in Ohio; and the rapidly expanding ice cream concept, Cold Stone Creamery.

Other notable tenants will include Ann Taylor Loft, Coldwater Creek and Talbots. There is also to be a showcase 80,000-square-foot Giant Eagle supermarket that will contain a bank, a dry cleaner, a photo processing center, a child-care center, a café and a climate-controlled wine section.

Legacy Village will be a much sought-after location for retailers, according to Randy Goodman, principal of Cleveland-based Goodman Real Estate Services Group, Legacy Village’s leasing agent.

“Because of the maturity of the Cleveland market, it’s hard for retailers to find high-end space,” Goodman said. “But with Legacy Village located directly across from Beachwood, the location is a must-have.”

The mall is key, Schneider asserted. “We aren’t trying to compete with them directly, but to enhance what they’ve done in creating an affluent retail area.”

But it isn’t just the retailers that will make the $130 million Legacy Village stand apart when it opens in October. First Interstate is taking pains to create a center that will look different.

“I’ve seen a lot of lifestyle projects that I think have a plasticity or a phoniness to them and a lack of authenticity,” said Kevin Zak, a partner at Cleveland-based architectural firm Dorsky Hodgson + Partners. “They’re supposed to look like a Main Street, but really they look like one single designer drew them.”

First Interstate and Dorsky Hodgson allowed the tenants to design their own buildings, to greater or lesser degrees, so long as it did not violate the traditional village look they were seeking for the project.

To get even further away from a uniform look, First Interstate is using a dozen different contractors for the overall project.

“We hire a separate site contractor,” Schneider said. “We hire a separate contractor to do all of the off-site roadway improvement work. Then we independently bid each building within a project. Some of our retailers wanted to build their own building, and we’ve allowed that. And we independently bid the interior build-out, particularly of the small-shop space.”

This approach puts many of the coordination tasks ordinarily performed by a general contractor on First Interstate’s shoulders, but Schneider said he doesn’t mind. First Interstate is no novice to retail development; the firm has developed more than 3 million square feet of retail space in northeast Ohio since its founding in 1989. Its most recently completed project is Avon (Ohio) Commons, an 800,000-square-foot power center 25 miles west of Cleveland.

Providing another touch of authenticity, the Main Street will be open to two lanes of vehicle traffic and is to include metered parallel parking, with the meter proceeds going to a local charity. Valet parking will also be available, or shoppers can use one of the lots encircling the site.

Building a lifestyle center in chillier climates presents a challenge that developers working in warmer ones don’t face, but Schneider has some solutions to that problem, too, and is testing underground snow-melting systems to keep walkways clear.

Dorsky Hodgson is also doing something about the snowy winter winds off Lake Erie that can cut like a knife. The position of the two-story Galyan’s building was shifted to shield the center’s Main Street from the prevailing wind.

“This has been the most exciting project that we’ve had the opportunity to be involved in,” Schneider said. “It will be a showcase for high-end retail in northeastern Ohio.”

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