Lifestyle Innovations
Some developers are stretching the traditional definition of a lifestyle center, leading us to the question: what are lifestyle centers evolving into?
Susan H. Fishman

Stanbery Development’s The Shoppes at English Village, Horsham, Pennsylvania, at just over 100,000 square feet, is an example of a lifestyle center that is expanding — or shrinking — the definition.

During the last few years, the lifestyle center has provided as a new type of business locale for upscale specialty retailers who traditionally relied on regional malls for the majority of their operations. But defining the lifestyle center has become increasingly difficult over the years, as the definition gets stretched more and more by developers, and the centers themselves border on town centers, urban entertainment centers, theme/festival centers or open-air regional malls.

The term “lifestyle center” was first coined by Poag & McEwen Lifestyle Centers Inc., who opened its first lifestyle center, The Shops of Saddle Creek, in Germantown, Tennessee, in 1987. Today, the definition varies from center to center. Most lifestyle centers are made up of national specialty retailers, but some rely on mainly local tenants. Most are retail-oriented, though some are mixed-use centers. Only half of existing centers have cinemas, and the size seems to range from as little as 90,000 square feet, such as One Pacific Place in Omaha, Nebraska, to the 760,000 square-foot The Summit in Birmingham, Alabama. No wonder there’s confusion among developers.

Steiner’s Zona Rosa project, located near Kansas City, Missouri, is another example of what the developer calls a “new town center.”

• They have an open-air configuration.

• They include at least 50,000 square feet of space occupied by upscale national chain specialty stores. (Retail categories most commonly represented are apparel, home goods, and books and music.)

• One or more table-service restaurants is present and sometimes a multiplex cinema.

• Design ambience is critically important. Lifestyle centers invariably have amenities such as fountains and street furniture conducive to leisure-time visits and casual browsing. The retail layout and street pattern often reflect a “Main Street” type ambience, allowing parking directly in front of stores.

• If a conventional or fashion specialty department store is present, it is usually in a smaller format than is customarily found in a mall.

Steiner + Associates’ Easton Town Center near Columbus, Ohio is one of the best known open-air centers developed in recent years. While it contains elements of the lifestyle center, it doesn’t technically fit the definition. Its owners refer to it as a ‘new town center.’

SCB: How do you define a lifestyle center?

Stanbery: It’s basically an outdoor shopping center that provides a convenient, upscale, tasteful place for affluent, sophisticated customers to shop and dine. We’ve tried to incorporate certain key elements: convenience, the ability to get in and out of the center easily and get to a particular store, and, architecturally, a great looking project with nice landscaping — the kind of element people will feel good about coming to.

Madison Marquette: We never came up with a definition of a lifestyle center. We call them ‘special places.’ The philosophy began initially with us looking at more upscale markets that were not being served. We wanted some critical mass to them, 200,000 square feet at least, with specialty fashion tenants and a lot of restaurants. And they were anchorless, although we still wanted box opportunities, like Barnes & Noble or Borders or a high-end sporting goods store. We later began to realize that it doesn’t have to be just upscale tenants; it could be a multitude of tenants. We started to see a different definition of the lifestyle center, expanding in its concept with theater, entertainment, food, drug and so on. So we began to look more at the community as a whole and the needs of a market.

Steiner: Lifestyle was very clear initially; it was a 150,000- to 300,000-square-foot center, very often unanchored, with a specialty tenant mix. It was basically a high-end strip center. But now we’ve stretched the definition. A lifestyle center is an extremely good product in a difficult-to-build environment, like New Jersey or urban settings — places where land is in short supply. A good example is Deer Park, which is northwest of Chicago. Another is Rookwood in Cincinnati — it’s a great infill location, a rich neighborhood, and you can’t find land in the area. A lifestyle center that can fit on a 10-acre site, on the small end, can be a strategically low-barrier-to-entry product that’s difficult to defend against competition.

Stanbery’s The Shoppes at Union Hill, Denville, New Jersey.

Stanbery: To us, the difference in a community center or town center is in the size. In our cases, it’s been a 12- to 15-acre site that’s more along the lines of 100,000 square feet.

Madison Marquette: It differs in the sense that a lifestyle center probably incorporates more upscale fashion and stores like Sur La Table, Williams-Sonoma and Pottery Barn that are blending with convenience and everything else coming in. Typical convenience centers have none of that. You’re dealing with more of the unique concepts rather than the traditional concepts that you see in shopping centers.

Steiner: As far as town centers — I call them ‘new town centers’ — there are some very specific characteristics, so they are not as confusing as lifestyle centers, which have anywhere from 200,000 to 800,000 square feet. First, a town center is anchored by public spaces, like Legacy Village in Cleveland or City Place in Palm Beach. The second characteristic is an integrated mix of specialty retailers with a strong leisure time mix. The third is that the center is planned, using traditional urban design principles. It does not have to be entirely open-air; it must have a strong open-air component to create that traditional urban design principle but it can also have an enclosed component. The fourth characteristic is that it’s mixed-use, with offices, residential and/or hospitality integrated within the project or master planned with the project. If you fulfill all four of them, you are truly a town center. If you miss two of them, you are not. “Urban Entertainment Center” was a term coined by a consultant in Philadelphia, named Mike Rubin (of Philadelphia-based MRA International), who wrote an article in Urban Land in the mid ‘90s. My definition of an urban entertainment center is that it is normally 200,000 to 300,000 square feet, and the primary purpose of the trip for the majority of the customers is to spend leisure time. The idea was that there was going to be a new project that will be created, whose main focus would be leisure time uses — theater, GameWorks, maybe a bookstore, themed restaurants. The concept did not work — there are no good working examples. There are a few exceptions, but because they don’t have the critical mass; they don’t have legs. They have a hard time surviving on leisure time business alone.

Madison Marquette redeveloped Manhattan Village shopping center — formerly an enclosed mall, into a lifestyle-like center. The center is located in Manhattan Beach, California.

Stanbery: We think square footage is where everybody gets into a big war about what a lifestyle center is. I don’t know that the size matters, whether it’s 150,000 or 500,000 square feet, as long as it has great shopping, is geared more toward an affluent customer and has that convenience factor. A 100,000 square-foot project can fit that definition very nicely. Most of the projects we’ve been involved in have been in the smaller range and fit the criteria in terms of the types of tenants, architecture, landscaping, food, and apparel and home shopping. For the most part, the project needs to be sized appropriately for the market.

Madison Marquette: In the beginning, size was very important to us. Critical mass is everything. In our mind, it had to have a minimum of around 200,000 square feet. Most of the lifestyle product that we do today service smaller, targeted community environments, which may be 100,000 or 150,000 square feet, as opposed to regional kind of development or growth. We’re doing a project in Cleveland, which is only 100,000 square feet, called Beach Cliff, but the interesting thing is that it’s part of an already existing community of stuff. So it has some of the elements of critical mass there. However, we are also looking at rather larger venues, approximately 500,000 or 600,000 feet, which obviously expand different kinds of concepts.

Steiner: A lifestyle center’s tenant mix has a very strong specialty tenant category that’s at least 200,000 to 300,000 square feet. It’s often combined with a strong leisure time component — cinemas, restaurants, nightclubs, cabarets, etc. — an integrated component where they are all part of one overall mix. A critical size of the leisure time component, without the cinema, would be 50,000 square feet — with it, 150,000 square feet or more.

Steiner + Associates’ Zona Rosa, Kansas City, Missouri.

Stanbery: The Shoppes at Union Hill was our first lifestyle center, which opened last year in Denville Township, New Jersey. The tenant lineup for the 88,000-square-foot center includes Talbots, Chico’s, Ann Taylor Loft, Gap, Gap Body, Banana Republic, Bombay, Coldwater Creek, J. Jill and Jos. A Bank.

We are also scheduled to open The Shoppes at Susquehanna Marketplace, a 110,000-square-foot center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, this fall. Tenants will include Talbots, Chico’s, Ann Taylor Loft, Williams-Sonoma, Coldwater Creek, J. Jill, Romano’s Macaroni Grill and Starbucks. The project will be the only location for most of these retailers between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, servicing Harrisburg, York, Lancaster and other central Pennsylvania communities comprising over 1 million people in a short drive.

Madison Marquette: We don’t call it a ‘lifestyle center,’ but Manhattan Village was an enclosed mall in Manhattan Beach, the most affluent community in Los Angeles. We originally wanted to create a total village, but we opened the mall a little bit and brought in the tenants that we thought served the trade area. The 551,000-square-foot center combines the enclosed mall, community center, medical office building and strong freestanding retailers and restaurants, including Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Ann Taylor Loft, California Pizza Kitchen and Baja Fresh. We’re going through an expansion now that will add another 100,000 square feet that blends into the mall. Every one of our projects is unique. We just aren’t comfortable with any kind of specific venue when it comes to lifestyle centers.

Easton Town Center, Columbus, Ohio.

We also recently completed Zona Rosa in Kansas City, Missouri, which will be the premier shopping, dining and entertainment destination in Kansas City’s booming Northland market. The project will feature 1 million square feet of upscale specialty retail, restaurants, entertainment, office, hotel and residential uses articulated along pedestrian friendly streets and public plazas.

SCB: What direction do you think lifestyle centers will take moving forward?

Stanbery: I think existing projects are going to continue to evolve and change over time just like any other aspect of retail. Tenants will come and go. Some will test the waters and won’t necessarily be successful in this venue, and others will. Ultimately I think retailers, their expansion plans, relocation opportunities, and new retail concepts that pop up will ultimately drive the growth of retail development, in general, as well as lifestyle centers.

Stanbery’s The Shoppes at English Village, Horsham, Pennsylvania.

Madison Marquette: Our definition is expanding. When we started out, our version of a lifestyle center was very specifically targeted to upscale communities with very upscale fashion tenants that were in a non-mall environment. Today, we’ve expanded that concept with more goods and services, such as food and drug, which we think are just as important as some of the upscale tenants, more restaurants, entertainment venues, theaters and so on than we had in the past. We’re even beginning to look at adding department stores back into our venues. We’ve just done a project in Emeryville in Northern California that’s about 300,000 square feet, with a Barnes & Noble, AMC theater, Old Navy and specialty stores, and we’re looking at expanding the center with a department store. We’re also adding 280 units of residential and a specialty grocery store to the center.

Steiner: The future of the lifestyle center is going to be limited. They will prevail in the few high barrier-to-entry, high-income environments where a mall cannot be justified or the existing mall is not catering to the demand.

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