Bringing Retail Home

By Jeff Gunning
Globe St. Retail
Jan. 31, 2005

Lately, my colleague Tom Brink and I have found ourselves chatting in corridors, over lunches, and in each other’s nearby offices. Because he’s primarily a multifamily residential architect and I typically design retail environments, our hectic schedules and heavy project loads have often prevented us from interacting as much as we’d like.

But over the past couple years we’ve had greater reason to make an effort—to sit in on each other’s meetings with clients and consult one another at various stages of design. Our boards are filled with mixed-use projects that draw on both of our fields of expertise. We attribute to a merging in the markets and the changing consumer landscape. Around the country and at every level of design, developers, municipalities and retailers are increasingly seeing the value of integrating shopping and living.

As consumers, home is more important to us than ever—and our definition of home is changing. We’re investing in nesting, and consequently we spend big bucks on home improvement. Although our homes increasingly reveal a desire to escape (such as more luxurious bathrooms!), we also feel a renewed interest in being close to the urban hubbub. Nice hardwoods still sell, but now so do walkable distances to Starbucks.

Shoppers now expect a sense of home where they shop. They expect convenient links to their working and living environments. They expect smart, sustainable growth. For retail developers and designers, this has translated to a reason to de-mall the mall. We’re seeing open-air lifestyle centers, hybrids, and shopping centers that make better connections to transit and surrounding development. Down to the smallest detail, whether it’s a cafe spilling onto the “street,” a public plaza, or a canopy and comfortable furnishings, an urban-style sensibility and the authentic feeling of home are proving to be critical components of today’s most successful retail developments.

But what’s next? How will this new retail DNA influence the most successful retail developments of tomorrow?

They will succeed by taking these “living lessons” to the next level. Over the next year, we will see more mixed-use projects not only integrating residential spaces—lofts, apartments, condominiums, houses—but being driven by them. More than simply retail, other uses such as restaurants, entertainment, spas, offices and civic centers will crop up in these developments, creating holistic live, work, play environments. In fact, we’ll see live/work/play become a development strategy that yields long-term market viability and sustainability.

Fortunately, there are already successful models everywhere. In revitalized urban neighborhoods, we see that living above the shop really does work (and always has) under the right conditions. In thriving new master-planned communities, we find that if cities, planners, developers and designers work together from the get-go, the right density, pedestrian flow, scale and tenant mix can make complex mixed-use development viable.

Even in traditional-style shopping centers, we see developers increasingly valuing links to public transit, offices and residences that make shopping a more natural and convenient extension of people’s lives. Inside the stores themselves, we see retailers hoping to extend their shoppers’ stays by embracing and communicating the “living” aspects of their brand.

It’s not easy, but with the right tools and relationships, the rewards are endless. Bringing retail and residential together goes far beyond setting it side-by-side. Instead, it begins with what Tom and I are currently experiencing. The greater the early and continued interaction of those who understand the pieces, the better equipped the whole puzzle is to thrive.

Jeff Gunning, AIA, is a vice president of RTKL, an international architecture and construction firm.