Colorado Real Estate Journal - February 19, 2014
The Villa Monaco shopping center was one of the many suburbanlike neighborhood strip centers that sprung up in Denver in the 1970s, when the city was growing fast and land was cheap. For years, the center, with 122,138-square-feet of gross leasable area at the southwest corner of South Monaco Parkway and East Evans Avenue, was anchored by a King Soopers. King Soopers vacated the space in 2010 and last year was replaced by a Neighborhood Market, the grocery-only concept by Walmart. The center’s owner, Brixmor Property Group, a real estate investment trust that went public in late 2013 and is the nation’s second-largest owner of community and neighborhood shopping centers, understood it wouldn’t make sense to have a modern Neighborhood Market anchoring the center, with the rest of it still looking like it came from an era when disco was the rage. Indeed, a number of newer shopping centers had been built along the Hampden Boulevard corridor, as well as farther north in central Aurora and the Glendale/ Denver area submarket along the Leetsdale Drive corridor. So Brixmor, whose predecessor company had paid $6.2 billion in 2007 for an Australian company whose 87 million-sf portfolio included Villa Monaco, decided to hire Denver-based G3 Architecture and Maxwell Builders Inc. to breathe new life into the aging center. Its much-needed facelift recently was completed, about a week ahead of schedule and within the budget, said Scott Higa, principal of G3 Architecture. Capital improvements included a new parking lot, landscaping, a new roof and new signage. “The center was really old and tired,” Higa said. “It is an early ‘70s retail center and it had not been architecturally upgraded for 40 years.” To modernize the center,“We essentially tore off the facades, the parapets and renovated the storefronts so they did not feel like an early ‘70s relic,” Higa said. The original construction was composed of a gravel panel fascia with vertical fluted concrete masonry block. The new design involved removing the existing fascia, providing significant reframing of the existing fascias and arcades and providing a new exterior insulation and finish system and cornice trim. Existing columns, supporting deep soffits, were also stripped of their gravel panel facades and reframed with a stone wainscot with a broader column dimension to help frame the building architecture. New soffit lighting and decorative column lighting were provided to help tie the buildings together through the use of lighting, redesigned plazas and sidewalks Maxwell Builders, the general contractor for the project, worked closely with Brixmor Property Group and G3 Architects to identify existing conditions, develop construction budgets, refine construction details, explore alternative exterior design elements and develop a renovation phasing plan that could accommodate the existing tenants that remained open for business during the construction period. “Maxwell was tremendous,” Higa said. “They were very good to work with. With older centers like this, you typically don’t have the existing drawings. So as you are demolishing and rebuilding for the new design, things come up. Maxwell was very good at dealing with the unexpected.” The Villa Monaco redevelopment, affecting more than 55,000 sf of buildings, was accomplished in four months, following a six-month preconstruction period. The center is in a strong trade area, which justified the renovation, Higa said. Some 20,584 households live within a one-mile radius of the center, 164,864 within three miles and 398,891 within five miles. The average household income is $51,394 within a onemile radius, $69,527 within three miles and $77,925 within five miles. “There are a lot of rooftops in the area to support retail,” Higa said. Many of the neighbors who have lived there for decades are selling their homes to younger buyers, he said. “One of the nice things about this area is that the homes typically have bigger lots than you will find closer to downtown,” he said. The center is in what is known as the Goldsmith neighborhood, but many residents consider it the north end of Bible Park, an informal name for the area that is a bit closer to the Denver Tech Center than downtown. Higa said centers built during the 1970s were too big and the retail wasn’t efficiently laid out. “I think land was cheap and plentiful, so they just built them too big,” Higa said. “Today, land is much more expensive, so you need to build them more efficiently.” In some cases, there is so much land associated with these neighborhood centers, it makes sense to build apartments on a portion of the land. “These centers aren’t exactly urban, but they are not suburban, either. They are kind of a hybrid,” Higa said. He said his firm has been tackling a lot of these older neighborhood centers in Denver. “During the last four or five years, when the economy was kind of sputtering, there was not a lot of ground-up retail development,” Higa said. “We helped reposition a number of these centers during the Great Recession,” he said. Even though the retail market is far off the bottom, he said there are still a number of centers in Denver that are ripe to be repositioned with a renovation. “I was just looking at one the other day,” Higa said. “It was very similar to Villa Monaco. It was a very large, sprawling center anchored by a King Soopers with too many adjacent shop buildings.”