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DECORATION DISPUTES

WHEN IT’S TIME TO DECK THE HALLS, LANDLORDS AND TENANTS DON’T ALWAYS AGREE

By Kathy Showalter

For the holidays, Sue Schilling typically decorates her women’s accessories store at Polaris Fashion Place, in Columbus, Ohio, with tasteful swags of wintertime greenery and white poinsettias tipped in gold.

She has used this theme since first becoming a Polaris tenant, when the 1.5 million-square-foot mall opened six years ago. Every year she tweaks the display to keep it fresh for the affluent shoppers who stroll past her small shop, Accent on Image.

Schilling does it not merely to make the store look pretty, however. Decor is an important holiday draw for independent stores like hers. Accent on Image sells jewelry, belts, sunglasses, handbags and similar accessories. But at only 2,500 square feet, the shop lacks the drawing power that her larger neighbors enjoy. Often it is what Schilling does inside the shop that reels in the sale.

“[Our decorations] are warm and inviting,” Schilling said. “People tell me all the time that we weren’t one of their destinations in the mall, but they were drawn in by our windows.”

Holiday decor can be a challenge for local retailers. Unlike many of the specialty chains that line a mall’s concourse or populate an open-air center, mom-and-pop shops have no national design team dictating taste. They rely on common sense and intuitive talent. On occasion, though, they run into an objection from a center manager armed with the terms of the lease.

“It’s not usually a huge concern, as long as the decor is professionally made and in keeping with good taste,” said David J. Rabinowitz, a partner at the New York City law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. “Problems might develop if a tenant plasters its front window with paper signs. If the landlord believes something is not in good taste, it typically has the right under the lease to make the tenant to take it down.”

Such disputes can occur at other times of year besides the holidays. One thinks of the mall landlords that sued The Movie Gallery for posting “going out of business” signs in store windows. Landlords may see such signs as a visual and psychological blight on their malls.

To be sure, aesthetics can be hard to dictate in a lease. But Polaris has tried offering retailers some coaching, says Jill Clark, director of marketing at Glimcher Realty Trust, of Columbus, which owns Polaris Fashion Place. “Those who push the parameters are the ones we coach,” she said. Some managers have walked the mall with a shop owner to point out store decorations that work and to explain why that particular retailer’s does not.

Public safety and economics are issues too. “The only trouble you ever run into is if a tenant wants a display that spills over into the common area,” said Charlene Scott, general manager of the Town Center at Levis Commons, an open-air specialty center in Perrysburg, Ohio, owned by Charlotte, N.C.-based Hill Partners. Such encroachments can interfere with pedestrian access and the sight lines of other tenants. Scott says she will usually talk to the retailer and follow up later with a letter.

The rules at Town Center are typical of those at many malls. Leasing contracts forbid tenants from using high-intensity or blinking lights directed into the common area, or prohibit music to be heard outside the store. Signs posted to the storefronts with scotch tape or temporary vinyl banners are verboten too. Though store interiors are a tenant’s business, the storefronts are very much the concern of the landlord, Scott says.

“We make sure window displays are product-focused,” she said. “We have a general rule of thumb: We make sure [window displays] enhance what a retailer does, and does not distract from what they do inside the store or the general mall decor.”

Fire codes and the Americans with Disabilities Act also have to be taken into account, says Glenn Tilley, president and CEO of The Becker Group, a Baltimore-based marketing firm. The rules apply equally to mom-and-pops and to design houses that develop extravagantly themed holiday decor for large malls, he says. Mall owners will pay anywhere from $100,000 to almost $1 million for holiday decor, passing along the costs to merchants. Becker clients include Taubman Centers, Simon Property Group and Westfield Group.

“While what we do has to meet the marketing goals of any center,” Tilley said, “at the same time, we have to incorporate reality into the experience. The whole process can take upwards of a year.” SCT