California Apparel News

The Grove developer Rick Caruso has branched out to the hospitality and the housing business, but in the next few months, he will get back to basics.

One of his most high-profile properties, The Grove, based in Los Angeles, will welcome four new top marquee retail tenants in April 2007.

Dubbed the “Spring Collection,” the new retailers will usher in a fresh look for the 5-year-old shopping center, according to Todd M. Russell, senior vice president of leasing and marketing at Caruso Affiliated. The new tenants are Michael Kors, Barneys New York Co-op, eyewear boutique Davante and beauty retailer Fresh.

Part of the mission of the Spring Collection is to provide more shopping opportunities for men at the park-like shopping center. Russell said that 58 percent of The Grove’s visitors are women. The shopping center hopes that guys will be more tempted to open their wallets with the anticipated increased selection of men’s apparel at Barneys New York Co-op. They may also be intrigued by men’s accessories available at Davante and beauty retailer Kiehl’s, which opened at The Grove in December 2006.

Yet the Spring Collection won’t be served in a neat row. The Barneys New York Co-op will be located toward the west end of The Grove’s Town Square, moving into a 9,200-squarefoot space that formerly housed the Amadeus Spa. It will be situated nearby the Grove’s popular Whisper Lounge restaurant.

The debut day for the store is March 22, according to Dave Neu, Barneys New York’s executive vice president of creative services. The Grove’s co-op will be divided into two floors. A dedicated women’s store will greet customers on the first floor. A staircase will lead up to a dedicated men’s store on the second floor.

The Grove co-op’s deacute;cor will feature whimsical line paintings by a yet-to-be-announced artist. The general ambiance of the store will be familiar to those who have visited the the Barneys New York Co-op in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. “It’s an evolution, not a revolution,” Neu said of the deacute;cor guided by Barneys’ vice president of store design, Philippe Hum.

The 2,000-square-foot Michael Kors will be located toward the east end of the center, adjacent to The Grove’s park area and the tenants Theodore and The Gap. It will take the former space of accessories retailer Siany.

The Kors store will be situated in a two-level space at The Grove and will be one of the more than 12 boutiques opened by the end of 2007 by the New York–based celebrated designer and “Project Runway” personality Michael Kors. A Michael Kors store also is scheduled to open at the Westfield Topanga shopping center in April.

The Grove’s Michael Kors store will reportedly offer the designer’s three lines: Michael Kors, Kors Michael Kors and Michael Michael Kors.

The Grove’s Barneys New York Co-op will offer expanded sections for footwear, accessories and men’s apparel. The store will also offer its own valet service.

The Grove has reported a 100 percent occupancy rate since it opened in 2002. Caruso Affiliated has been one of the leaders in the movement in the past several years to turn once-enclosed shopping centers into open-air environments, or lifestyle centers.

The emphasis has been on intimate shopping experiences, often reminiscent of small-town shopping, compared to the large, enclosed regional malls built in the 1970s and 1980s. The lifestyle centers might represent a shift in the way Americans shop, said George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants, based in San Marcos, Calif.

“Anytime there are major changes in the configurations of shopping centers, they are often long-term trends,” Whalin said. “Everybody from Simon Property [Group Inc.] on down has been building lifestyle centers.” Indianapolis-based Simon Property is reportedly the largest publicly traded real estate investment trust in the United States.

In the case of The Grove, lifestyle often means offering open space or parkland, where visitors can just come to hang out. “Whether they purchase or not is not paramount to us,” Russell said. “If they come here to just meet a friend for coffee, that’s fine. We know that they’ll come back to shop. The fact that they chose The Grove for coffee tells us that they feel comfortable here. They feel a sense of familiarity and ownership of the environment.”

However, more than 92 percent of The Grove’s visitors make a purchase at the center’s luxury and better retailers, such as Coach, Anthropologie, Los Angeles retailer Lucy Zahran and Nordstrom, according to Russell.

Mixed-use properties

Open space will continue to be important at Caruso’s properties. The Americana at Brand center in Glendale, Calif., which is scheduled to open in Spring 2008, will offer more than double the parkland at The Grove.

Luxury housing will be another important feature of the Americana. The property will offer 100 condominiums and 244 apartments. Amenities will include room service from the Americana’s restaurants, daily maid service and a concierge also provided by the shopping center. Sales and leasing prices have not been set.

On Jan. 26, Caruso Affiliated announced that it purchased the century-old Miramar Hotel and Resort in Montecito, Calif., about 92 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. The hotel will offer a small selection of luxury retail when Caruso finishes renovating the property. The completion date is tentatively scheduled for 2010.

Caruso Affiliated plans to keep an ambitious schedule with its other properties. The Shops at Santa Anita, based in Arcadia, Calif., is scheduled to open in 2010. The Village at Playa Vista in West Los Angeles, which will offer 225,000 square feet of retail, is scheduled to open in fall 2009. Development of Golden Gate Fields, based in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Albany, has been put on hold to concentrate on Caruso’s other projects, Russell said.