What Color Is Your Center?
For the Brentwood Shopping Center in Denver, fiesta colors spark a revival.
James Martin

Thirty years ago, Brentwood Shopping Center was a first class destination shopping center just a step down from the major enclosed regional malls. It once housed a high-end tenant mix and was home to a multi-screen theater. Though, like most of Denver’s major commercial thoroughfare on South Federal Boulevard, the center fell on hard times. Over the years, the changing neighborhood gave rise to a significant influx in minority populations.

Before, Brentwood Shopping Center was one continuous band of dirty white.

However, things are changing rapidly in the area. A vibrant Hispanic population and a growing Asian community have brought new life. The majority of businesses, comprised of small mom and pop operations, are starting to give way to businesses of a larger scale. This exciting shift reflects the rising financial clout of the both the Asian and Hispanic communities in the Colorado marketplace. The increase of a large well-employed working community and their attendant prosperity is fueling a renaissance in Denver businesses catering to their needs and appealing to their tastes.

When investor George Blau and his partners purchased the Brentwood Shopping Center in mid-2006, they saw the potential for a long-term investment in a property that needed ample improvements, but was well positioned to service its community demographic. Patrons of the mixed, but predominately Hispanic community, surrounding the 133,000-square-foot center had retail and service merchants that could server a wide variety of their everyday needs at their disposal.

Brentwood Shopping Center after it was repainted. With new, vibrant colors evoking a Mexican fiesta, the center looked new and clean — without spending a lot of capital on an expensive rehab.

Mr. Blau’s first goal was to provide a facelift to the tired old facade, signaling the rebirth he had in mind, while grabbing the public’s attention once again. Thinking extensive money was going to be needed to accomplish this, his group was prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new monument sign and significantly more doing and an architectural remodel on the buildings. He was considering adding an extensive cornice to all the buildings as well as the customary new lighting, landscaping, parking lot resurfacing and the like.

Before progressing too far down that road, however, Mr. Blau called in The Color People, with whom he had worked before. We met with the group and determined that very little of that expenditure was needed.

What we really do is marketing. A carefully considered paint scheme can make as much difference as an entire architectural rehab. As where full construction treatments often take an owner a good decade to pay off, paint is a lot more cost effective. Plus, at the end of that 10-year period, styles will have changed again. Painting a center the right color can double the value of your maintenance dollar by making it a marketing dollar as well, and 10 years from now when you need to repaint and the color trends have changed, color can bring you back to being up to date with a fresh coat of paint.

At Brentwood Shopping Center, the almost 800-yard wide frontage was originally one endless band of dirty white. There was no focus and no way to tell one store from the next. The first design stroke was to break up the facade into easily digested sections by coloring various segments of the building with a variety of colors, and punctuated by the occasional placement of strong dramatic colors. Not only did this eliminate the daunting  facelessness of the property boring the public, it allowed people to be able to pick out specific sections to easily identify individual stores thus pleasing business owners greatly. It also took the old center and made it feel as much like today’s popular lifestyle centers as it possibly could.

The selection of the color was based on colors that bring to mind a Mexican fiesta, but toned down a touch so that they work architecturally. It was important to be festive, but not go over the line and become raucus. While the colors at first look all look quite different from

each other, in actuality there is a distinct color tone that threads throughout insuring a theme. A yellow tone runs through all the colors: the greens are yelllow-greens, the reds yellow-red and so forth. These familial colors all work very quietly to create a unified presentation. Both sections of the center and all the individual segments are plainly one center and thus clearly indentifiable as different from the assmblies of single retail buildings jumbled together that line the rest of the boulevard.

By using similar strong colors on the existing monument signage in an inventive manner, the plans for expensive new signage could be eliminated altogether. The color used on the sign posts was applied to all of the lamp posts in the parking lot as well to carry the eye from the signage back the main buildings increasing identity and awareness  of center’s entire property all the way out to the street.

In the professional opinion of Kirk Badger of Dunton Commercial Real Estate, property manager for the center, what developed, in terms of recognition, surpasses even the landmark monument sign that soars 50 feet in the air. Paint and color suddenly became the new identification for the property. Plans to give the center a physical facelift were abandoned at considerable savings for the property owners.

“Not only does the new color scheme give the property unique identification, the acceptance of the bold, bright colors by the Hispanic community has been overwhelmingly positive.” says Badger.

Coupled with the opening of the Azteca Ranch Market, a first class  supermarket, in March 2007 and its ethnic appeal, Brentwood Shopping Center will be the pride of the community it serves for decades to come. Additionally,  it has sparked a heightened interest from prospective tenants as well as motivating to current tenants to renew leases at higher rates.

James Martin is president of Denver-based The Color People.


©2007 France Publications, Inc. Duplication or reproduction of this article not permitted without authorization from France Publications, Inc. For information on reprints of this article contact Barbara Sherer at (630) 554-6054.