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LIFESTYLE THE LATIN WAY

Latin Americans adapt a U.S. retail design to fit their culture

BY MARÍA BIRD PICÓ

There will be some fresh breezes blowing through Latin America’s shopping centers as landlords explore design alternatives to the conventional enclosed mall.

In particular, some are embracing the lifestyle center format so popular in the United States, and they strive to integrate their centers into the surrounding communities. Lifestyle centers are basically open-air centers with a streetscape layout, boutique-type retailers and sit-down restaurants and cafés.

Lifestyle centers are entirely appropriate for the Latin American market, architects say. After all, Main Street shopping is still the region’s rice and beans.

“The opening up of retail centers to their surroundings is having a positive impact on the areas where they are located,” said architect Martin Gômez Platero, of Montevideo, Uruguay, who has designed shopping centers in that country and in Ecuador. His firm, Estudio Gômez Platero, for instance, is involved in the design of Terminal Terrestre and Shopping, a 646,000-square-foot retail center in Guayaquil, Ecuador, that incorporates a bus terminal and an open plaza with water fountains and a food court.

In San José, Costa Rica, shoppers at the two-year-old Terramall get an impressive view of nearby mountains and a volcano as a backdrop to a partly enclosed food court. The mall, which sits on a former coffee plantation, contains 840,000 square feet of retail space.

“It was not planned as a lifestyle center, but it’s an example of a very dynamic enclosed mall that borrows elements of street retailing,” said Roberto Linhares, a Brazilian architect and a vice president of Beame Architectural Partnership, Coral Cables, Fla., which was one of the mall’s designers. “The retailers, for instance, have different facades and signage to create different identities. The mall was also designed to relate to the nature that surrounds it.”

The priorities in Latin American shopping center design have been climate, security, basic shopping needs and, more recently, entertainment. In the past, developers have generally allowed these constraints to dictate big secure boxes, hermetically sealed off from their surrounding neighborhoods. For their part, shoppers have come to expect a one-stop destination where they can combine shopping with a diversity of activities, such as dancing, dining, bowling and movie-watching.

The emphasis is still on building conventional shopping malls in what is still a relatively untapped retail market, but developers are starting to branch out with an array of entertainment options and eye-catching architectural designs.

“Our population is relatively young, and many of our cities lack recreational areas,” said Alfredo Cohen, vice president of Grupo Sambil, a Venezuela-based shopping center development and management firm with projects in Panama and Costa Rica as well. “Retail centers that incorporate entertainment are filling that void.”

Latin America’s median age is 24.3 years, even lower than the 26.2 of another developing region, Asia. By comparison, the U.S. median age is 35.3, slightly lower than Europe’s 37.7.

Equally significant is the fact that 62.6 percent of Latin Americans are between 15 and 64, a large pool of productive people and, consequently, potential shoppers. Latin America also ranks high in private consumption growth. Between 1990 and 1997 annual consumption growth was 3.9 percent, outpacing the United States, Canada, Europe and Central Asia.

Family plan
A younger population also means more families with young children. And unlike in the United States, in Latin America shopping is a family enterprise, which is one reason retail centers are adding play and amusement areas, says Roy Higgs, CEO of Development Design Group, Baltimore. “The idea is to offer more of a shopping experience for the family.”

Latin America is still a basic mall market where “the mall means to be everything for everybody,” said retail consultant Stanley L. Eichelbaum, SCMD, president of Cincinnati-based Marketing Developments. There is now growing pressure to provide leisure and food in the form of fast-food outlets, restaurants and supermarkets.

In some countries developers have gotten even more creative with the tenant mix. Eichelbaum cites the 10-year-old Nova America in Rio De Janeiro, expanded in 2002 to accommodate a 7,000-student college campus. Nova America already had 624,000 square feet of retail space, offices, restaurants and bars. Since the 2002 expansion, which doubled its size, there has been a 50 percent increase in traffic, to 1.2 million people a month, the center’s owner says.

In Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, entertainment options appeared in the mid-1990s to counteract a slowdown in retail sales, says Carlos A. Lecueder, AMD, ASM, an Uruguay-based shopping center developer, manager and consultant who has worked in Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru.

The 20-year-old Montevideo (Uruguay) Shopping has undergone 11 expansions, the first few of which added various forms of entertainment when the economy slowed. These included 10 movie screens, a theater, a bowling alley and a skating rink. Similarly, in Santiago, Chile, the 20-year-old Parque Arauco has added a medical center, 12 movie screens, a bowling alley, an art center and a theater, among other uses.

New wave
But things may have come full circle now that regional economies are improving. “The construction of retail space is more profitable for developers of shopping centers than entertainment,” said Lecueder. “That’s why I believe that, following the entertainment stage and having overcome a major economic crisis, the trend will once more be to increase retail space.”

That could mean a wave of new types of retail centers, including power, regional and open-air centers, which have yet to take off in the region, with the exception of Brazil, Chile, Venezuela and Mexico.

From an architectural point of view, too, there is an incentive to stop building boxy, unattractive malls that clash with their environs, particularly at sites rich with Spanish colonial architecture, developers say.

With possibly one exception, executives and designers agree that a bona fide lifestyle center has yet to be built, though there are hybrid centers in which a lifestyle section has been added to an existing traditional mall. Linhares, for one, says he thinks the one Latin American center that fits the lifestyle center definition to a tee is the 353,000-square-foot, open-air La Isla Shopping Village in Cancún, Mexico. The $55 million shopping and entertainment center, inaugurated in 1999 by the Gicsa Group, resembles a small village dotted with 120 specialty retailers, 20 carts and kiosks, and an interactive aquarium.

The rest are new and old malls that have added lifestyle center elements as they vie to stand out in an increasingly competitive market, sources say.

“Many of the projects, like MetroCentro, in El Salvador, have aspects of lifestyle centers,” said Jeffrey Gunning, a vice president at RTKL Associates, a Dallas-based architectural firm. “But the design trends, at least in Central America, are still driven by the mild climate and smaller anchor tenants.”

MetroCentro, owned by El Salvador’s Grupo Roble, is a 35-year-old center in San Salvador for which RTKL has designed 11 expansions. The addition of stone cladding and structural elements has resulted in what RTKL calls a “sun-filled village” made up of stone and stucco buildings, pavilions and towers.

Weather certainly needn’t be an impediment to the construction of open-air centers, architects say. “In the U.S. we are putting lifestyle centers in areas of heavy snow and hot weather,” said Linhares. “It’s just a matter of people getting used to it.”

Gunning says MetroCentro exemplifies the way designers and developers can work around the challenges posed by the rainy climate of many Latin American countries. Arched roof canopies were added above the two-level mall to protect against the weather and provide natural ventilation.

Arcades, awnings and landscaping can be used to mitigate inclement weather, says Oswaldo Barrios, an associate vice president at Development Design Group.

Security and beauty
An often-cited reason for favoring the traditional enclosed mall is crime and vandalism, particularly a problem in Bogotá, Colombia; Caracas, Venezuela; Guayaquil; Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil; and other big cities. Shopping centers are booming in such areas precisely because crime-averse shoppers increasingly seek the safety of one-stop shopping malls. Security guards keep a high profile in the region’s malls, which would be disconcerting in Europe and the United States, but not in Latin America, where it is welcome, sources say.

“People are inclined to go to one place to spend the entire afternoon,” said Barrios. But this does not mean that open-air centers cannot be made safe too, he and other designers say.

“In Plaza San Marino, for example, we created a very open street facade with terraces, arcades and stairs,” Barrios said. “By controlling the access points to the center, we can provide a safe environment without compromising the integration of the center with the rest of the city.”

Built in Spanish colonial style, the two-year-old Plaza San Marino, in Guayaquil, is a shopping and entertainment project that combines an enclosed galleria with the outdoor elements of an open leisure center. The landmark feature is a 110-foot-high bell and clock tower complemented with a 12-screen cinema, several restaurants with terraced seating and retailers.

Security is a high priority at the 300,000-square-foot expansion of Centre City Mall in the heart of Chaguanas, Trinidad, a Beame Architectural Partnership project. There will be controlled access points, and retailers and offices will face the street to enhance visibility. A bridge connects the second levels with retail on both sides. Under the bridge, there will be restaurants.

“You can have the typical tenants relate to the streets and its surroundings,” said Linhares. “It allows retailers around the area to survive as well.”

Latin America’s architects say they hope these examples mark the dawn of a new era of innovative shopping center design, like the one under way in the United States.