A new luxury mall
A peek inside South Norwalk luxury mall to open on Oct. 11
After more than two years of construction a new South Norwalk mall will open next month. The three-story SoNo Collection features 725,000 square feet of retail space, three atriums, a bowling alley, and a top-level garden.
After more than two years of construction, the SoNo Collection, a new South Norwalk mall, will open next month.
The three-story Brookfield Properties project features 725,000 square feet of retail space, three atriums, a bowling alley and a top-level garden. As brick-and-mortar stores close across the nation, the SoNo Collection’s team is confident it will succeed.
“Our CEO says, ‘The bazaar was here in 600 B.C., it will be here in 6,000 A.D.,’” Matt Seebeck, the center’s senior general manager, said during a recent tour. “Because we’ve built a smaller shopping center at around 700,000 [square feet], we’ve been able to be more selective and focused on what the customer here wants.”
The mall will open Oct. 11.
U.S. retail tracker Coresight Research said the number of brick-and-mortar store closures announced this year has already exceeded the entire number of stores that closed in 2018. Last year, about 6,000 stores closed. So far, more than 8,200 stores have closed in 2019, and another 4,000 are expected to close by the end of the year.
Wall Street bank Credit Suisse sparked panic over a “retail apocalypse” in 2017, when it predicted that 25% of malls would close by 2020. In a more recent report, the firm said that retail survival will be a story of “the haves and have nots.”
“To be perfectly clear, we do not believe all of retail, or every mall, is going away,” the firm said. “The demise of the malls has been widely forecasted for more than 20 years. It remains our view that, for the most part, the best quality malls, especially those in major markets, have better long-term prospects and will have a significantly higher survival rate.”
Seebeck said Brookfield Properties, which owns 170 shopping centers nationally, tailors each center toward the local market. The company found that Norwalk-area residents favor housewares over apparel, so they focused 20% of retail on housewares. “It’s a market we identif i ed in southwestern Connecticut,” Seebeck said. “So we’re responding to that.”
An eight-level parking garage, Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom anchor the center, which does not have a food court. “We've shifted away from [the food court] because, again, our customer is shifting the way that they shop,” Seebeck said. Instead, the mall will feature several coworking spaces.
Similar to WeWork offices, the spaces are designed for use as a community office space or meeting place with free Wi-Fi. “We're focused on providing gathering places,” he said. “If you want to hold an event, a meeting, a gala, we can also accommodate that.” Curated murals, trees and interactive light installations will decorate the indoor and outdoor community spaces.
Since construction began in May 2017, the center has created about 6,000 construction jobs and is expected to create thousands more in retail, security, maintenance and office work.
About 90% of retail space is already leased. Nordstrom and some select stores will be ready for shopping when the mall opens on Oct. 11, and more will open throughout the
end of the year, into 2020. Retailers include Sephora, Pandora, Bath & Body Works, sit-down restaurants and food vendors. Amazon may open its first Connecticut store in the mall.
Come November, the SoNo Collection will forgo the traditional mall Santa for “first-to-portfolio” holiday experience. “Santa will walk through the shopping center and engage with guests,” said Seebeck. The mall will also have a “whispering grove,” where children can whisper their holiday wishes to Christmas trees and have them travel to the North Pole. “We're constantly looking for new concepts,” he said.
A full list of retailers and restaurants will be available on the SoNo Collection's website