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IN BRIEF

Mall tunes in to Zen

People are bringing their pet turtles to Serramonte Center and releasing them into the mall’s tranquil koi pond. The former center court fountain, now filled with multicolored fish, has become a bamboo-rimmed lagoon where turtles can find a happy existence sunning themselves on boulders under a skylight. The koi pond is part of a Zen-inspired attempt to reconnect the suburban San Francisco mall with its Asian consumer base.

“We took a look at it, and it was so apparent what needed to be done,” said Gorge Wickwire, a principal at Seattle-based Callison Architecture. “It wasn’t tuned to the community at all. So we drew up something simple, elegant and Zenlike.”

Capital & Counties U.S.A. hired Callison to renovate Serramonte shortly after buying it in February 2002. At the time, the mall was successful but tired-looking, the new owner says. The center, which went up in 1968, was out of sync with its customer base, which is now 70 percent Asian.

Located in Daly City, the 860,000-square-foot enclosed center is anchored by Macy’s, Mervyn’s and Target. Its cruciform floor plan has four equal arms meeting in the center court area at the fountain-turned-koi-pond. Callison adopted a four-seasons motif, with a muted, seasonal color scheme for each hallway.

And the fountain’s transformation into a koi pond is a nod to the fish’s prominence in Asian cultures. “We noticed that often entire, multigenerational families came to shop together,” Wickwire said. “The koi pond provides a place for the grandparents to rest and maybe watch the infants while the young adults go off and shop.”

Rooftop roughage

Rooftops, it turns out, are not such a bad place to have things growing.

The two forces most destructive of a roof are ultraviolet light and the freeze-thaw cycle, says Kelly Luckett, president of Florissant, Mo.’s Green Roof Blocks, one of a handful of companies that provides plantings for roofs. “That constant expansion and contraction is what really tears roofs apart,” Luckett said. “A green roof can prevent that and make the roof last up to four times as long.”

Green roofs, fairly prevalent in Europe, use rooftop installations of plant life to realize many benefits, including insulation, extended roof life and decreased runoff.

Luckett’s company is testing a roof block product it introduced in March. These blocks are modular trays containing soil and plants of the sedum family, which has more than 400 varieties. A cousin to the cactus, sedum is a low-lying ground cover that is highly drought resistant — certainly a handy feature if your landscaping staff are reluctant to lug watering cans up onto rooftops.

“We use different planting strategies for different parts of the country,” Luckett said. “The hardiness zones run from the deep South up to Toronto, Canada. So there is some plant selection that we can formulate for every part of United States.” The roof block is priced at $12.50 per square foot and, unlike other green-roof solutions, requires no roof reinforcing.

At present there are five test installations, the largest of which spans 500 square feet at the University of Georgia. Three full installations have been contracted, totaling 20,000 square feet. The product is not yet installed on any malls. But Luckett points out that, aside from saving money on heating and cooling, a green roof could make shopping center projects more attractive to environmentally conscious community groups.

Ikea and the environment

Is Ikea the Swedish word for green? Perhaps the company might like people to think so. The Scandinavian furniture chain, which currently operates 178 superstores in 31 countries and will open five new U.S. stores next year, is promoting conservation in a number of areas, including store construction, manufacturing, shipping and waste recycling.

Each Ikea store has an “environmental coordinator” on-site who oversees waste recycling, energy conservation and education. And each store uses separate compactors for nonrecyclable trash, cardboard and plastic. “During 2003 we recycled or reclaimed 73 percent of the waste coming out of our stores,” said Joseph Roth, Ikea’s spokesman on chain expansion issues. “Our goal is to get that number up to 90 percent by the end of 2005.”

Ikea’s green goals come directly from the top. In 2002 the Swedish Association of Environmental Managers honored Anders Dahlvig, Ikea’s group president and CEO, with its Award of Good Environmental Leadership.

“The environmental considerations of a new store depend, of course, on the region it is in,” said Roth. “But we always use the latest and best technology for environmentally appropriate building and energy utilization.” The process often begins by identifying a brownfield site to rehabilitate. And Ikea prefers sites near public transportation.

This technology includes Atlanta-based Atlas Roofing Corp.’s ACFoam II insulation. This product, which contains up to 68 percent recycled material, offers a high degree of insulation and does not deplete the ozone layer. Then there are the refrigerants in the HVAC units Ikea uses in most of its North American stores. These, which are made by Tulsa, Okla.-based Aaon, are also non-ozone-depleting.

Ikea says it cut energy use for heating its stores worldwide in 2003 from 23 kilowatt hours per cubic meter of goods sold to 21.

Meijer gets new identity

Meijer realized it needed to set itself apart from the competition. So it turned to Broadway. Eighteen months ago the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based food and general merchandise retailer hired the design team that created the sets for Broadway musical Hairspray and the puppet action film Team America to consult on a new brand identity.

Meijer stores, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, span about 225,000 square feet each and sell complete lines of groceries and soft and hard goods. That puts the retailer in the same arena as powerhouses Wal-Mart and Target — an unenviable position, for sure.

“We were looking for ways to differentiate ourselves,” said Larry Zigerelli, the chain’s executive vice president. “We were not satisfied with the ambience and shopability that we had.”

Meijer brought in New York City design firm Rockwell Group to study its brand and recommend ways to reinvigorate it. Carmen Aguilar, a Rockwell principal, says her team trekked through dozens of Meijer’s stores, looking at the architecture and the placement of merchandise and signage, interviewing consumers and reviewing the comments sent to the retailer’s Web site. Uppermost in the Meijer consumer’s mind, it turned out, was “how to find things in the store.” Indeed, inside the stores the team found merchandise stacked nearly to the ceiling and signs that were not helpful.

“We wanted to make the customer’s experience as simple as possible,” said Aguilar. Reducing those towering stacks was no easy chore. It meant examining inventory and warehouse needs as well as implementing new systems for replenishing goods, she says.

Meijer built a prototype store in Grand Rapids that embodies Rockwell’s design, which allows an uninterrupted view to the back wall facilitated by lower shelves, brighter lighting and crisp, new signage.

Some departments, such as health and beauty, and pharmacy, have been moved up front for shopper convenience.

Rockwell is also upgrading the quality of Meijer’s in-house branded products to deepen its appeal to its core customers, which Zigerelli defines as middle-to-upper-income. The stores have expanded their offerings of organic foods and upper-end wines, he says. Meijer has added higher-end, uncommon brands, including the Columbia outerwear and Carter for Kids lines.

The retailer, which posted $11 billion in sales last year, has begun implementing the new elements in stores as they come on line. Meijer will adapt existing stores to the new prototype as they get renovated.

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