Blending the planning and the architecture creates the desired effect for communities. 

Written By Tony Dellicolli and Rick Harrison

A recent trend in land development is the return to the concept of placing residential units above commercial buildings, where apartments or condominium units have the convenience of services on the lower level(s). These housing solutions are typically found in urban environments and cater primarily to two markets: “Empty nesters,” professional people who no longer have children at home, and professional people with busy lifestyles who find urban life exciting and can be near the office. Today’s empty nesters may have grown up in urban areas, then moved to the isolation of fringe suburban areas to raise their children. Once the children move out they may desire to be in an environment where restaurants and shopping are only a few blocks away, instead of miles down the road. The photo above is an example of one of these new town centers in Addison (TX).

In suburbia, where residents live in bedroom communities served by the regional mall, if there are localized commercial and office uses they are typically set in more of a strip-mall setting.


Strip Mall Advantages are Minimal
From a retailer’s standpoint, when their store is located along traffic routes the exposure is tremendous for attracting customers. For example, in a mature suburban city, along an arterial road, a coffee shop would be located on the outgoing traffic side for those morning commuters inviting a quick stop on the way to work. The strip mall is designed for convenience… it allows the driver to recognize there is a coffee shop, where they can easily turn into the center and park in front of the store, get their coffee and be on their way. It is this exposure and easy access that makes strip malls so desirable. The customer gets their products and retailers make their profits. What can be wrong with that?


Strip Mall Disadvantages are Many
The butt (rear) of the typical strip mall lacks architectural detail and is used for garbage, employee parking and loading. If not screened properly, it is an eyesore to surrounding areas. Proper screening is very expensive, as can be seen by the tall brick wall in the rear of this California strip mall set against single family homes.

Since the strip mall is along arterial streets, they are typically at the front door of the community in which they serve. The face of the typical suburban strip mall rarely is up to the architectural standards that presents the town as a special place to live. Often the first impression one gets when leaving a highway to the local streets is a mish-mash of cheap looking architecture, seas of asphalt, parked cars and trucks, a variety of signage competing for your attention and a lack of landscaping. Often this showcases the community as something of a low standard… not good for the city or its residential values.

Many strip malls are designed in a layered “outlot” fashion. The developer first builds the strip mall set further back from the arterial street to leave room for the outlots. After the strip mall is leased and established, the outlots are sold to fast food chains and national retailers, shielding the original strip business from their customers, eventually destroying their business. The developer walks away with huge profits leaving those that bought the center from them struggling to survive. The visual clutter of the outlot businesses further tarnish the landscape of the city. Rears of these outlot stores are typically not shielded, further marring the character of the town.


What is Behind the Loading Docks?
Multi-family homes! Yes it seems that rational thinking is to place even more people along the rears of these strip centers in multi-story buildings to overlook the screening walls onto the trash areas of strip malls. How much sense does that make?


Proximity of Residential Neighborhood Services
Quite simply, the most desirable commercial property is location-location-location. This means two things: exposure and customers. If the location has plenty of customers (enough population density to support the business) but is located where no one can see it, the business will likely fail. That is why it is absurd to suggest placing retail in the center of a low density suburban neighborhood far from vehicular traffic corridors. Another reason is that most residential developers in suburbia are just that – residential developers. A home builder that purchases 300 acres wants three hundred acres of the product they sell – houses. The builder often thinks that commercial is just a blemish that can diminish the home values!


The Neighborhood Marketplace
What if you can have all the advantages of the strip mall – erase the disadvantages and then improve on the concept to actually increase the value of both retail and residential?

Many, if not most suburban commercial strip malls, have businesses that can survive quite well without loading docks.  The area of paving and screening walls, along with associated extra setbacks (land is not cheap today) from residential, can all be transferred to new architectural models that enhance the community and promote business as well as upgrade the landscaping.


How can that be?
Assuming in suburbia the strip mall is adjacent to residential areas, the strip mall can be transformed into the Neighborhood Marketplace.

This is a picture of the rear of a strip mall in Charlotte (NC)… yes that’s right… the rear! Notice nobody is parked back here – everyone has parked in the larger parking areas in the front of the stores. I am standing next to a 10’ high stone screening wall about an eighth of a mile long.

This wall screens the view from the townhomes adjacent to the center.
If someone living in one of the townhomes wants to get a pizza at this shopping center they get into their car and drive about ½ mile to go to the restaurant that is just a few hundred feet away!

The view of the rear of this center is much nicer than looking across the townhome parking lot to the row of garage doors across the way…

If the wall was removed, as well as the parking that no one was using, that land could have been used for detention ponds, fountains, board walks, patios and quite a few extra townhouse units. The internal walk system could lead all residents to the shops, giving them an actual excuse to walk instead of drive!


Understanding the Concept
The concept of the Neighborhood Marketplace relies on a blend of planning and architecture.

The key to marrying architecture and planning together for the Neighborhood Marketplace is the scale and the level of execution of architectural detailing. It is important for developers and owners to recognize early in the process how important it is to develop an architectural style that can be executed throughout the development. The style or theme of the residences needs to be carried out in the architecture of the Neighborhood Marketplace. The architecture must have a residential flavor reflecting the same level of detail as the residential homes. This can be seen by the commercial at Liberty on the Lake in Stillwater (MN). Liberty gets the architecture correct with stores that do not have loading docks and have exposure to arterial roads.  It is also somewhat disconnected from the residential area having streets form barriers to pedestrian ways, so it does not fall into the Neighborhood Marketplace category of design.  

More often than not the typical retail strip center is designed to look like a ghosted façade or Hollywood set, where the customer is looking at a two-dimensional design built only for the purpose of exposing a commercial sign.

For a true execution of this new planning concept to work, the commercial retail stores will still need to be designed having good exposure to the major or secondary thoroughfares, and be designed as through type, in-line retail shops. For example, the store frontage needs to provide easy access for the vehicular customer, and at the same time provide the patron visiting the store on foot with access to what would normally be considered the rear of the center. The space between residential and retail is part of an overall flowing open space system within a larger neighborhood. It is the control of flow between residential and commercial uses with both pedestrian and vehicular systems that make this concept work well.

The open space between residential and commercial becomes a great place to locate decorative detention-retention ponds, boardwalks, patios, etc.

In some situations there may be no way around having all stores serviced from the front. This is where inventive architectural solutions is in demand.

The rear of these centers can be cleaned up visually by simple placing the loading zones into hidden service courts carefully placed between the retail shops. By the use of masonry screen walls and landscaping, access to the stores and service delivery areas can by totally hidden as shown in Tamarack Village, a Woodbury (MN) retail center.

How many of you are aware of where the delivery services for all of the stores are placed in a regional mall? Probably, not many.

This concept of Neighborhood Marketplace will allow the developers and municipalities to eliminate the need for any type of tall, opaque screen walls to be placed between a residential and retail-type strip center, as illustrated in the master plans being developed by Rick Harrison Design Studio. LDT