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Shopping Centers Today -> November 2002
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MALL MAKEOVER
New anchors open at ongoing $1 billion Fashion Show project in Vegas
By Debra Hazel
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| A giant canopy with video screens will help the mall compete with other spectacles on the Strip. |
Fashion Show Mall’s $1 billion expansion is set to reach a major milestone this month, with the opening of its first phase. When the enlargement is completed, the mall will put the Strip on a par with America’s leading fashion shopping streets, according to The Rouse Co., which owns and manages the mall.
The overall redevelopment, which is scheduled to be finished in the fall of 2003, will double Fashion Show’s size to nearly 2 million square feet, more than 500,000 square feet of which is to be small shops. Developers say they expect annual sales per square foot to double to $1,000 within a few years.
“The goal was to create a landmark property that would be high-profile, and make it synonymous with other properties of the highest caliber,” said Gary Dempster, a partner at Altoon + Porter Architects, the Los Angeles-based designer of the expansion. “South Coast Plaza, Ala Moana and Fashion Show would be interchangeable, and no one could say which one was better.”
The first phase (called the west expansion) is scheduled to open Nov. 1, adding Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s Home, as well as tacking on 173,000 square feet for 130 new shops and restaurants. Existing anchors Dillard’s, Macy’s, Neiman-Marcus, Robinsons-May and Saks Fifth Avenue have also increased in size. The second phase (the Las Vegas Boulevard expansion) is to open October 2003 and will add a 138,000-square-foot Lord & Taylor (the first in southern Nevada) and 117,000 square feet of new specialty shops. The completed Fashion Show will then have eight anchors, becoming one of only three centers to have that many — and the only one to have them all under one roof, according to both developer and architect.
The second phase will also give the mall its own spectacle on the Strip, in the form of a 400-foot-long canopy just off Las Vegas Boulevard called The Cloud. The canopy, suspended 180 feet high and covering a 72,000-square-foot plaza, will not only offer shade from the desert sun, but will help the mall compete with some of the Strip’s other conspicuous landmarks, such as the volcano at The Mirage and a scaled-down Eiffel Tower.
Meanwhile, the mall’s retail will put the Strip on the same footing as leading fashion streets around the United States, according to Rouse.
“Las Vegas is truly becoming a place where you have the levels of shopping you do on the major streets in the United States,” said Rita K. Brandin, a vice president and senior development director at Rouse.
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Opened in 1981, the center provided a traditional mall experience on the Las Vegas Strip. Rouse acquired 50 percent of the center, originally developed by The Hahn Co. (later TrizecHahn), through its 1996 purchase of the Howard Hughes Corp. The remainder was acquired from TrizecHahn when it sold nearly all of its retail projects in 1998.
Rouse quickly saw the need to expand the project.
“It was a strong asset, but it could have become limited, primarily because of the constraints of the department stores,” Brandin said. “There were key departments that they couldn’t have in their existing stores.”
The move could also be seen as pre-emptive. The Mandalay Bay casino announced plans in the late 1990s to build a traditional regional mall at the other end of the Strip, though that has not come to fruition.
The purchase of 27 acres next to the mall from casino builder Steve Wynn gave Rouse the land to expand; the next challenge was to persuade the existing anchors to allow the newcomers to sign on. This, however, turned out not to be difficult. “[The anchors] were very supportive,” Brandin said, explaining that the existing anchors recognized it was better to have competitors at the mall rather than have them attracting customers to another property.
“The more the merrier — we have to drive traffic to this mall,” said Anne Wendrick, a spokeswoman for Neiman Marcus. Neiman Marcus is expanding from 102,000 square feet to 160,000 square feet, allowing the store to boost its fine apparel department from 8,000 square feet to 22,000 square feet and increasing the shoe department to 10,000 square feet.
The other anchors are expanding too, with Saks and Dillard’s moving into completely new facilities. Specialty tenants to open in the first phase include Apple Computer, Coach, Guess, J.Jill and Tommy Bahama. “When you talk about 500,000 square feet of small space, you have to have a broad range of tenants,” Brandin observed.
The west expansion will add one restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, while the Neiman Marcus expansion will add two — one for fine dining, the other more casual. Additional deck parking is also being built near Spring Mountain Road, which runs down one side of the mall.
Lord & Taylor will be brought into the mix next October to occupy the site of the former Dillard’s store. Also included in the second phase will be a second, 11,000-square-foot food court.
The Cloud, created by designers Monk Askew and Richard Oren, will contain video screens showcasing entertainment events taking place in the newly created Great Hall, an 80-foot-wide interior space nearly triple the size of a typical mall’s center court, and drawing in people walking on Las Vegas Boulevard.
The Cloud and the entertainment venue “will open up new doors for the mall,” Wendrick noted. “It will open it as a venue for conferences, fashion shows.”
The entire mall, last renovated about 10 years ago, is being redone in a combination of limestone flooring and oak rails and accents. Three new entrances will be built on Las Vegas Boulevard to improve access, including one that will open onto a pedestrian bridge connecting to Le Reve, a $1.8 billion casino and resort that Wynn is planning for the site of the former Desert Inn.
“We’ve changed all existing materials,” Dempster said. “This place has been completely transformed.”
Construction on the Fashion Show expansion began in July 1999, with the mall remaining open throughout. Work has proceeded surprisingly smoothly, despite the challenge of coordinating the schedules and goals of eight different anchors, all working with eight different architects.
“One thing that has been great is the cooperation among the stores,” Dempster said.
Brandin acknowledged, however, that the work has affected the center’s sales, which now total about $500 per square foot, down from a peak of $600 per square foot at about the time of Rouse’s acquisition. But Rouse said it expects sales to exceed $1,000 per square foot by 2006.
About 40 percent of Fashion Show’s business comes from Las Vegas, a proportion that the expansion is not expected to change much. “As a local, I can say it is the place to shop,” said Mike Kammerling, senior retail adviser at the Las Vegas office of brokerage firm Grubb & Ellis.
Las Vegas now has more than 1.4 million residents and continues to grow by 70,000 annually, according to Rouse. New York City-based developer Donald Trump has announced plans to build a condominium complex adjacent to the mall.
Farther up the Strip, the Forum Shops at Caesars has also announced expansion plans. But Kammerling predicts the market will absorb the additional retail in the long term, and that sales will increase.
“They [Rouse] are building a truly state-of-the-art project.”
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