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| LA's Hot Retail Destination |
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| Pockets of Retail Highlight Opportunities |
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| By Tom Gilmore |
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riving through LA's retail district for the first time, most visitors would never guess that some of the hottest boutique retailers in the world call this area their home. Every day a steady stream of celebrities and fashionistas fill the trendy shops and restaurants that are scattered across the area's several successful pockets of retail development.
The LA retail district runs from La Brea Avenue to Robertson and encompasses the cross streets of Melrose Avenue, Beverly Boulevard, and Third Street. Today, the street front retail is a mix of eclectic shops that range from vintage clothing to fine home furnishings in a gritty urban backdrop.
Looking more broadly at the shopping district, a few important developments occurred over time that set the stage for the area's success.
LA's retail roots originated in the early 1980s when a variety of boutiques began opening along Melrose Avenue. For example, while many are familiar with the Johnny Rockets chain, few outside of LA may realize that its first restaurant opened on Melrose in the mid-1980s. Today's retail shops range from Kicks Los Angeles, a store dedicated to edgy urban athletic wear, and Slow, with hipper H&M style apparel, to Voom by Joy Han, which is featured in most of the top style magazines, and Notorious, which stocks some of LA's best women's apparel collections. Noteworthy restaurants include Koi, The Ivy, Taste, comme Ça and 8 oz. The Avenue also is home to The Groundling and Improv theaters.
At the same time that Melrose was emerging in the 1980s, Taubman opened the 880,000 square foot Beverly Center, which brought substantial new retail to the area — and anchored the western edge of the emerging shopping hub. Today the center is anchored by Bloomingdales and Macy's and is home to trendy national tenants such as Club Monaco, DKNY, H&M and Hugo Boss.
Although the area is well located and has excellent regional access, the area's mature built-out character has made new development rare. In fact, only one major commercial project has been developed here in the last dozen years — The Grove.
Capitalizing on the notoriety of LA's historic Farmers Market and, perhaps, the only readily developable parcel able to accommodate a large-scale development in the corridor, Caruso Affiliated took the orchard and nursery behind Farmers Market and created a 575,000 square foot upscale, open air lifestyle center that complemented Beverly Center's merchandising with names such as Nordstrom, American Girl Place, Crate & Barrel, Pacific Theaters, Apple, Tommy Bahama, J.Crew, and Lucky Brand Jeans. Restaurants range from well established formats such as Cheesecake Factory and Maggiano's Little Italy to specialty offerings like Wood Ranch BBQ & Grill and The Whispers Lounge. The Grove also boasts an active filming schedule.
While little new development has come to this part of LA due to the lack of available sites, re-investment is ongoing as storefronts change hands and new retail concepts are introduced.
The ingredients that continue to fuel this area are a solid residential base. A cursory drive through the area reveals very established, upscale neighborhoods like the ones south of Melrose and east of Highland. From a statistical standpoint, these affluent patterns come through in the profile of area residents — showing 41,000 households with an average household income of $88,600 within a 1½ mile radius.
Beyond this residential base, the area also has significant daytime employment from the area's 2.3 million sq. ft. of office inventory. While the majority of office space is smaller scale, major tenants in the area include CBS (515,000 sq. ft.), the Writers Guild of America (90,000 sq. ft.), and offices for Cedar Sinai Medical Center.
The final ingredient that you can not forget is the diverse array of retail and restaurants that make this corridor a special place. For LA, be it the enclosed Beverly Center with its upscale shops, the open-air Grove with its mix of national and regional tenants, the Farmers Market that is home to unique foods and restaurants, or the wide array of cutting-edge vendors along the strand that have come to define the LA-style and attract celebrities daily — LA offers a residents and visitors a one-of-a kind mixing place.
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Tom Gilmore
SVP, Investments
Tom is responsible for identifying and managing investment projects and has extensive experience overseeing the development of trend-setting "mainstreet," resorts, and leisure-based retail and mixed-use projects. Tom attended Towson State University and the University of Baltimore. He is a member of ICSC, The ULI and The National Trust for Historic Preservation. |
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