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Shopping Centers Today -> May 2004
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ECUADOR’S PLAZA A DESTINATION FOR RICH AND POOR
BY IAN RITTER
Ecuador might be poor, but it has proved it can support a first-tier mall.
Plaza San Marino, an upscale shopping center in Guayaquil, a major city in the western part of the country, is closing in on its one-year anniversary, and its developers say they have reason to celebrate.
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“[The sales per square foot] is an enormous number when you look at the incomes of the people who live in Guayaquil,” said John Clark, president emeritus of Development Design Group, the Baltimore-based architecture firm that designed the project.
Plaza San Marino’s mix of local and international tenants includes Hugo Boss, Polo Ralph Lauren, Skechers, Tommy Hilfiger and Tower Records. The Ecuador-based retailers include department stores Etafashion and Deprati Hogar.
Though most of the city’s 2 million residents can’t afford to shop regularly in the stores, people do come to San Marino to walk around and eat at the food court, which features U.S. fast-food restaurants, says Michel J. Deller, owner of Urbanizadora Naciones Unidas, the project’s developer and owner. Many of the Plaza’s international tenants are also at Quisentro, a mall owned by Deller’s company in Quito, the nation’s capital.
In addition to such high-income local shoppers as there may be, San Marino is also frequented by tourists who come to Ecuador from other South American countries, and by Europeans, Deller says. “We’ve had people come from everywhere.”
There isn’t anything in the States that looks like San Marino, says Clark. The center is a three-level enclosed mall; each level has outdoor space with open-air cafés and restaurants. But if he had to compare it to a U.S. center, Clark says, it would probably be CocoWalk in Coconut Grove, Fla., near Miami.
Many of the materials used to build the center, which is designed in a Spanish colonial style, were handcrafted on-site, Clark says. Local artisans hand-carved much of the center’s concrete, and the iron for the detailed handrails and fixtures was cast on-site.
“It’s a completely different way of construction,” Clark said. “You get a wonderful [feel] of permanence you don’t get from American shopping centers.”
It’s also different from what has been built in South America lately, which Clark calls a “poor rendition of contemporary architecture.” The design for San Marino was taken from older parts of the city, he says.
Urbanizadora Naciones is so impressed with San Marino’s first year of business that it has decided to incorporate some of its open-air features into Quicentro, its enclosed Quito mall. The company is in the process of expanding Quisentro from 350,000 square feet to 420,000 square feet. It expects to complete the work by the end of next year.
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