| Valparaiso Walk
New Shopping
Center Positioned for Success
by Jeffrey
Steele Positioning was all-important in building the $25 million
Valparaiso Walk shopping center in the northwest Indiana city.
|
A seven-year-old vacant building on the proposed site had been abandoned
by Menard's when the home center chain opted to build a larger store next door.
The issue was "could we keep the old Menard's building and just renovate,
or do we take it down and start from scratch?" said Dushan Bouchek, associate
with Cleveland-based Herschman Architects, the Valparaiso Walk designer.
As
the architects and developer studied the site, they found the old building's positioning
could potentially work for tenants who were interested in occupying the center.
Eventually,
however, the developer and designers elected to create a new building backing
up to the highway behind the site.
That decision allowed all parking to
be placed in front of the center. Second, it permitted the inclusion of three
"outlots" for smaller retailers, banks or restaurants.
"The
project itself was a reorientation of the site, from the highway facing orientation
of the Menard's to the overall retail facing of the new development," said
David Schwartz, president and owner of Brookfield, Wis.-based Innovative Construction
Solutions Inc., the general contractor.
"Menard's actually faced Route
49 and backed up to Silhavy Road, but this center backs up to 49 and faces out
to Silhavy and the other retailers around it. When you look at it from a global
perspective, you have a U-shaped retail development."
Ambling
Through the Walk Situated on the southwest corner of Highways 49 and 2 on
the east side of Valparaiso, the two-building, 147,000-sq-ft. shopping center
with space for a third blankets. It is built of masonry with block and steel-frame
construction.
The project with seven retailers began in March 2004 and
will be complete in June when the construction team will delivery a Best Buy store,
with opening about 60 days later. Besides Best Buy, Valparaiso Walk will be anchored
by Bed Bath & Beyond, Marshalls and Michaels. Most of the center's tenants
had their store openings in the fall.
Parking was allocated at five spaces
per 1,000 sq. ft. of shopping center, yielding a parking lot of approximately
735 spaces.
Recycling a Home Center The decision
to reposition meant that the old Menard's was razed, but materials from the building
and its parking lot were put to good use, which is expected these days of a building
just a few years old, Schwartz said.
"The demolition contractor recycled
basically all the building," he said. "The concrete was crushed and
reused in this project as the base for the paved area. The steel was recycled
for other uses offsite.
"Menard's salvaged the lights and the HVAC
units for their reuse. There was very little thrown away from that building. It'd
be fair to say 90 percent was recycled."Integrating
Retailer Designs The main Valparaiso Walk design issue was one developers
of shopping centers frequently encounter, said Gary Pachucki, principal with the
Chicago-based developer IBT Group, which specializes in shopping centers.
"When
you're dealing with national credit tenants, they all have their own designs,
which can't be compromised," he added.
"The challenge is to design
some kind of detail to tie the facades together. This is not an architecturally
heavy project, based on the rates [tenants] pay for lease space. As a result,
you're just trying to match the building design to the requirements of the tenant."
Kenneth Mullin, IBT Group's project executive, said: "The [problem]
architecturally is to take these diverse needs and weave them together into a
uniform façade. We'd all like to do spectacular architecture, but there's
only so much you can do, given the need to weave them together."
Herschman
Architects responded by giving each of the major retailers its own portal designed
to its specific branding requirements. The remainder of the facade was given the
same masonry throughout the entire "scheme," Bouchek said.
"You
give the tenant just enough that they're satisfied with their entries and their
storefronts, but still talk them into being cohesive with the entire building,"
he added. Rear-End
Retailing Ordinarily, the rear and sides of a shopping
center would be no cause for concern from a design perspective, but because Valparaiso
Walk backs on busy Route 49, the rear and sides of the building represented special
hurdles.
Extra money was spent on parapets to allow screening of all loading
docks and rooftop mechanicals to give the center's rear as appealing an appearance
as its front, Bouchek said.
"We had to carry the colors of the masonry
and the design look of the front through all four sides," he said. "Some
of the tenants were able to put their signs on the back of the building facing
the highway. So there had to be a design consciousness to the back of the building."Deadlines
Important In building out retail spaces, the chief obstacle
was meeting tenants' deadlines.
That is par for the course in shopping
center projects, Mullin said. Large national tenants like Bed Bath & Beyond
are highly experienced and expand into numerous new shopping centers each year.
"As
the developer, you commit to deadlines you need to meet," Mullin added.
"The
deadlines allow the rent flow that drives the performance of the shopping center."
The
tight deadlines meant that coordination, communication and teamwork were essential.
Especially important was the choice of both an architectural team and construction
team that understood the processes and coordination required in a shopping center
project.
Each of the national tenants has preferred vendors for everything
from carpets to roofing systems. Moreover, each of those vendors must obtain documents
and submit prices to the contractor, which buys and installs the materials.
"By
having an architect on board who has experience with the vendors, it's much more
efficient," Mullin said.
Coordination was also essential in delivery
of materials and crews because both entries into the site are shared with operating
stores - the south entry with the new Menard's and the north with an Aldi's supermarket.
"There are shared driveways and shared parking lots," Bouchek
said. "So it turned out to be a complete shopping center that included our
neighbors. That took a lot of thought, negotiations and planning to make everyone
a part of the program."
To ensure that entries to Menard's and Aldi's
weren't blocked during construction, all recycled materials such as crushed concrete
and ground-up asphalt were stockpiled temporarily where the outlots would later
be built, Mullin said. |
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