West Elm To Take Up Residence Downtown

Retailer Will Use D.C. Financing

By Dana Hedgepeth
The Washington Post
April 13, 2006

West Elm, a furniture and home goods chain and the second retailer to take advantage of a city financing program, will open next spring in the historic Woodward & Lothrop building at 10th and F streets NW.

The announcement was made yesterday by Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and developer Douglas Jemal, who said the store will be one of the chain's largest on the East Coast. West Elm, a division of San Francisco-based Williams-Sonoma Inc., will occupy 37,000 square feet on the first and second floors of the building, which Jemal owns.

Two years ago, the city created a $30 million program of tax incentives to lure retailers downtown. Clothing retailer H&M, which received $2.9 million from the city program, called tax increment financing, opened in the building.

The city is giving West Elm $4.9 million in tax increment financing to construct the space for its store. The debt will be paid off with some of the sales taxes generated from the store.

"They do very high volume, and they bring an element of what downtown doesn't have," said Norman Jemal, vice president of Douglas Development Corp., who negotiated the deal. There are few such stores in the core downtown area, he said.

West Elm has 14 stores across the country, and its District store is expected to generate sales of about $500 a square foot, real estate brokers and retail experts said.

City officials have wanted to attract retail to the Woodies building for years. Douglas Jemal bought the building in 1998 from the Washington Opera for $28 million and put an estimated $100 million into renovating it.

Office tenants in the almost 500,000-square-foot building include the Recording Industry Association of America, the National Endowment for Democracy, the FBI, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Tribune Co.

The deal comes as Douglas Development has several other projects underway along F Street near the Woodies building as it attempts to draw more high-end retail to the corridor, which has been mostly fast food, electronics and souvenir shops.

The company recently finished the $120 million Atlantic Building, an almost 300,000-square-foot office building across the street from the Woodies building. And it has plans to turn a strip of closed stores near 11th and F streets NW, which included a Popeyes restaurant, a martial arts studio and a Kemp Mill records shop, into a 250,000-square-foot office building. Douglas Development is also acquiring land across from Ford's Theatre on 10th Street NW, where a souvenir shop and waffle shop sit, to build an office building.

"I want it to be a place that people come to shop," Norman Jemal said of the F Street corridor. "I want to attract people from all over the area, just as Woodies would have done back in its day."