The
war for Mario Batali´s Eataly was just the beginning as the city´s top shopping
centers (Westside Pavilion and Westfield Century City are among them) race to
complete nine-figure reboots that will choke the upstarts and lure big spenders
back from online.

In
spring 2017, Eataly will open at expanded and revamped Westfield Century City
mall just yards from CAA. Mario Batali´s massive dining-oriented specialty
Italian food emporium had been scouting its debut L.A. location for years
before announcing in 2014 that it would take a multistory space at the retail
center, alongside new tenants such as Tom Ford. The belle of the commercial
real estate ball, THR has learned, was snatched by Westfield late in the
dealmaking game from its archrival Taubman Properties, which had been in
negotiations with the brand as an anchor for its own $500 million renovation of
the Beverly Center, scheduled for completion by the 2018 holiday season.
“Westfield made an aggressive push to do it at the end,” says a
source with knowledge of the deal. “In the age of the internet, when you
don´t need to shop at a mall, marquee experiential retail is the holy
grail.” For his part, Eataly USA CEO Nicola Farinetti says he was won over
by Westfield´s rooftop: “It´s going to be something we´ve never done
before,” he says. “We´re going to brew, we´re going to have a
ginormous grill — fire will be the main focus of cuisine up there.”

Welcome
to Los Angeles´ ever-escalating mall wars, an arms race of luxury renovations
to existing facilities and boutique-brand cool hunting in a region that
accounts for 25 percent of California´s $400 billion retail marketplace (over
all categories), where shopping center spending has grown nearly 33 percent,
not accounting for inflation, since 2010 — almost double the national growth.
The city whose sprawl, climate and parking addiction essentially birthed the
modern shopping mecca — influential genre architects Victor Gruen (his firm
built South Coast Plaza) and Jon Jerde (Universal CityWalk) both were based
here — is in the midst of a transformation. Gone are the indoor promenades and
a focus on get-you-in-and-out efficiency. Newly prized is any passable Jane
Jacobs-ian nod toward authentic social interaction, which just might keep
people hanging out in the consumption nexus longer. 

“We´ve
reclaimed civic space, we´ve reclaimed the outside, the sidewalk, al fresco
dining — 30 or 40 years ago, people, bizarrely, were not seeking that,”
says Frances Anderton, host of KCRW´s DnA: Design and Architecture show.
“So now it´s about having malls be the place where you think to go to be
with friends and family — rather than go to the department store — in an era
when people are buying online.” Not such a new phenomenon, really, says
stylist George Kotsiopoulos. “Teenagers always used to hang out at the
mall,” he notes. “And now everyone´s looking to hang out somewhere.
Particularly in a city like L.A., where there´s no main area to watch
people.” 

All
of this validates Rick Caruso, whose flagship outdoor retail center The Grove
opened in February 2002 a mile east of the Beverly Center and whose success has
helped pioneer a national turn in the sector toward more open-air,
streetfront-oriented, urbanism-minded projects. “The Grove has clearly
created a road map for them to follow — obviously our competitors have been
studying what we do and are responding,” he says. (Caruso since has built
a luxury mixed-use midrise condominium a block from the Beverly Center and is
at work on another.) 

New
mall thinking is manifesting itself all over the city. There are the smaller,
hipster-skewing projects like Platform, which features high-end brands (Aesop
cosmetics, Blue Bottle coffee and Magasin, a men´s store from former
Bloomingdale´s men´s fashion director Josh Peskowitz) and opened in March next
to Culver City´s Expo Line station. “With most malls, no matter which one
you go into, they are all exactly the same. You might as well shop
online,” says Rose Apodaca (who wrote the biography of retailer Fred
Hayman, known as the godfather of Rodeo Drive, and is the co-author of a recent
beauty book with Dita Von Teese), noting that Platform´s painstaking curation
upends that assumption. “You may be more patient with a mix of retailers
if you get the sense of finding things that are more one of a kind.” Then
there are the old-school, office worker-targeted centers like what used to be
Macy´s Plaza in downtown L.A. Now retooling and calling itself The Bloc, the
structure has ripped its roof off, signed quirky Austin-based cinema Alamo
Drafthouse and brought in San Francisco artist Chris Lux to tag colorful murals
(among the city´s “most Insta-ready street art,” trumpets one
website) along its fortress-like exterior walls.

Meanwhile,
Macerich, owner of the drab, sepulchral, 31-year-old Westside Pavilion, an
indoor mall on Pico Boulevard a few blocks west of the Fox lot, now is
brainstorming its own property overhaul, including opening up the front walls
for ground-level retail on Pico while looking to lure an anchor tenant with
some serious oomph for the husk that used to be Nordstrom, which has decamped
to none other than Westfield Century City. (Macerich declined comment for this
story.) “Location-wise, even if [Westfield head] Peter Lowy or Rick Caruso
had it, it would be difficult,” says commercial real estate agent Jay
Luchs of the space. “You need an Eataly type, a real anchor. It´s not
easy. Macerich has a challenge ahead.”

William
Taubman, COO of Beverly Center proprietor Taubman Centers, says even city
retail stalwarts face that challenge. “It´s obviously a competitive
market, and you need to respond to the competition. People´s expectations have
changed. The narrative for us was, we were very weak in food. Now we´re going
from the weakest to the strongest.” Though it lost out on Eataly, the
Beverly Center has hired chef Michael Mina, most recently seen on the Westside
at Sam Nazarian´s ill-fated high-concept XIV along the Sunset Strip, to oversee
The Street, an artisanal food market — Sbarro-strewn food courts are so last
century — that will be focused on tightly curated global street fare concepts.
(Mina says his own entry in the smorgasbord will be Middle
Eastern/Mediterranean: “It´s going to have these open-faced laffa
sandwiches.”) It will be situated on the top floor of the mall beneath a
massive, blocklong skylight. “We wanted to do a river on the roof, a light
river,” says noted Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas, who´s
responsible for the Beverly Center renovation (his best-known work is a
swooshing marvel of a ceiling at China´s Shenzhen Bao´an International
Airport). “It reminds you that you´re here, in L.A.,” he adds.

Indeed,
genuflecting toward the greatness of L.A.´s outdoors — its light, its climate,
its topography — is now de rigueur among the region´s mall machers. “It´s
all about delivering a Southern California experience,” says Westfield COO
William Hecht. “This is why we´ve engaged Kelly Wearstler” — the
interiors specialist who single-handedly revived interest in Hollywood Regency
design a decade ago — “to bring that authenticity through” on its
expansion. Says Wearstler of her design plans for the Century City behemoth:
“We´re going to provide a sense of rawness and organic sensibility through
stone and wood. We´re going to make sure you feel like you are where you
are.”

This
story first appeared in the June 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.