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Shopping Centers Today -> August 2001
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SANTANA ROW SPURNS LIFESTYLE LABEL
By Edmund Mander
As though things are not confusing enough already about what constitutes a lifestyle center, now there’s a new twist: Companies that own what appear to be genuine lifestyle centers are so wary of the term being hackneyed by pretenders, they’re not using it.
Take Santana Row. The project, which Federal Realty Investment Trust is opening in San Jose, Calif., next year, has many of the classic characteristics of a lifestyle center. Stretching along several blocks of the downtown, it will have street-front cafes and boutiques, a pedestrian-friendly downtown ambience, and a higher-income customer base living in attractive apartments and luxury townhouses that Federal is building in and around the project.
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| The developer of Santana Row does not consider it to be a lifestyle center. |
Like the original lifestyle centers, it will have no anchors.
“The place itself is the anchor,” said Nathan Fishkin, director of Street Retail, a wholly owned subsidiary of Federal Realty Investment Trust. He pointed to the expensive architecture, the upscale restaurants, and the street life it will engender. It will be accessible to pedestrians and cars alike. So if this isn’t a lifestyle center, what is?
“‘Lifestyle center’, to me, is somewhat of a substitute of what we knew before as a higher end strip center,” he said. “Because it’s being applied to that, I think it’s misleading to apply it to what we’re doing.”
So now that imitators apparently have successfully made off with the term, what is Fishkin calling Santana Row? “We have trouble fitting it into some of the definitions,” Fishkin admitted. And he does have a point: The scale of Santana Row does exceed that of the average lifestyle center. In addition to its 680,000 square feet of stores and restaurants, four- and five-story blocks will accommodate 1,200 luxury rental homes, including lofts and townhouses; a 200-room boutique hotel; a farmers’ market; a movie theater; and parks and plazas.
An urban infill project, Santana Row is one of four projects built by Federal Realty’s Street Retail subsidiary that have been praised for contributing to urban revitalization rather than sprawl.
The company at press time had only identified a handful of its tenants — Borders, Crate & Barrel, BCBG and Gucci, to name four — all classic lifestyle tenants. But Santana Row goes beyond the lifestyle center format, Fishkin argued.
As such, Federal has pioneered a concept, but, as yet, it doesn’t have a name, he said. Which is probably just as well: It would only get stolen.
 | Current Issue November 2008 |