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FIG GARDEN ALWAYS AHEAD OF ITS TIME

By Joel Groover

Fig Garden Village, Fresno, Calif., has the hallmarks of a newly minted, 21st-century lifestyle center — it’s an open-air oasis built for the needs of time-pressed shoppers and choosy national tenants alike. The 300,000-square-foot retail complex offers drive-up parking in a gardenlike setting. Its town-and-country architecture forms the backdrop for a regular round of children’s festivals, fund-raisers and evening jazz concerts. Its tenant mix blends fashion, entertainment and convenience, and its proximity to a prime office corridor and some of Fresno’s wealthiest neighborhoods helps keep vacancies low and tenants hopping.

But unlike the enclosed malls across the country that are being reconfigured with lifestyle components, Fig Garden Village has featured many of these modern lifestyle center hallmarks since it opened in 1956. “I would venture to say this is the father of lifestyle centers,” said Skip Rollf, senior investment adviser at the Clovis, Calif., office of Sperry Van Ness. “Fresno has never had shopping centers where people like to get out and walk, with the exception of Fig Garden Village.”

Not that the present-day center is an unaltered relic. Through the decades, its owners have adapted the 30-acre property in response to such industry trends as the decline of smaller cinemas and the rise of stadium seating in the late 1990s. The latest to make such corrections is Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Donahue Schriber, which had big plans for Fig Garden Village when it acquired the center for some $90 million in 2005. The previous owner, locally based LandValue Management, had taken the center a leap forward by bringing in a Whole Foods market and several new lifestyle tenants, but Donahue Schriber hoped to use its redevelopment expertise, national tenant relationships and deep pockets to take Fig Garden Village “to the next level,” says Dave W. Mossman, executive vice president.

“We have always felt this real estate was what we call ‘Main and Main,’ ” he said. “It has a lot of tradition. It is a place anyone who lives an hour north or south of Fresno might make day trips to visit.”

As part of its $100 million redevelopment, Donahue Schriber tore down Fig Garden Village’s vacant, 17,000-square-foot movie theater and replaced it with a 12,000-square-foot, sit-down and fast-casual dining precinct. The private REIT, which operates 83 retail centers throughout the West, also replaced an operating Gottschalks department store with a multitenant building. Those changes helped it woo Banana Republic, Coach, Coldwater Creek, J. Jill, Pottery Barn and Soma. “One of the things that has been driving lifestyle development is that a lot of the mall tenants over the past five or six years have been coming outside,” Mossman said. “We’re capitalizing on that.”

But the allure of outdoor shopping has always been a factor in the success of Fig Garden Village, which was built and owned until the 1990s by Allen L. Funch Jr., a local developer. According to the 1993 book Fresno: California’s Heartland, by Eli Setencich and Robert Torres, the original center’s dozen freestanding buildings replaced a fig-and-peach orchard and coincided with a 12,000-acre farming and residential development push dubbed Fig Gardens, which had its origins in the 1920s. Historically, Fig Garden Village has played a dual role in the community, the book says. Its pleasant atmosphere and events schedule made it a gathering place, to be sure, but its drive-up parking, banks and post offices, and similar service tenants appealed to those needing to make a quick stop.

Before Donahue Schriber acquired it, however, the center was losing ground to the local Fashion Fair and River Park malls, says Patrick S. Donahue, president and CEO of Donahue Schriber. Today Fig Garden Village is 97 percent leased, with sales per square foot projected to exceed $600 this year. Its tenants pay a hefty $325 per square foot, triple net, on average, says Rollf. True, more of those tenants are national operators rather than mom-and-pops, and this has sparked complaints among some longtime Fresno residents. But the overall character of the center remains intact, says Donahue. “It does have a lot of the old-time shopping center feel to it, authenticity and a little bit of nostalgia,” he said. “There is competition, but we stand a good chance of being able to improve the center by bringing in merchants that can do substantial volumes. And that is what the game is about — putting together people that can do a lot of business.”

That rule, like Fig Garden Village itself, is something that has not changed all that much since 1956.