Business First - September 1st, 2000
Hagan Properties this week inked deals that give it complete ownership of the plaza and the ground beneath it. The purchases allow Hagan Properties to move forward on a $16 million expansion and renovation plan that will dramatically change the plaza.
With the completion of the purchase, Hagan Properties released more details about major stores coming to the plaza at 4600 Shelbyville Road.
They include Wild Oats, a Colorado-based gourmet grocery store that offers a massage therapist, and new and improved stores for familiar retailers such as Hawley-Cooke Booksellers and Circuit City.
Benton Seay, Hagan Properties president, said his company completed on Wednesday the purchase of 34 acres, including the ground under the plaza, from Marshall Realty Co., which had owned the site since 1954.
Hagan Properties, which also includes principal Scott Hagan, also bought out the shopping center’s remaining partners: Jim Patterson, Michael Fleishman, Ed Glasscock and Dick Thurman.
Terms of the purchases were not disclosed.
As reported last week by Business First, Hagan and Seay’s plans for the Shelbyville Road Plaza include dramatically increasing its size, from its current 248,000 square feet to 367,000 square feet; punching out the center of the U-shaped structure and converting it into a rough V; and incorporating a new main entrance off Bowling Boulevard. The estimated cost of the project is $16 million, according to Seay.
“With Oxmoor and Mall St. Matthews, this is the regional ground zero for shopping,” Seay said during an interview Wednesday. The project will make the plaza a real player in such an important retail area, he said, by resolving its “limited parking field and lack of critical mass, and offering a fuller variety of goods and services.”
Hawley-Cooke co-owner Bill Schuetze praised the expansion plans for the plaza, saying Hawley-Cooke would benefit from the addition of “wonderful new co-tenants” and the plaza itself becoming a “retail hotspot”.
Seay said the renovation and expansion will be done in two phases. Phase one roughly covers the spaces immediately around the footprint of the existing U-shaped center, and Seay said he has only 50,000 square feet of space left, enough for one major retailer, still available in that segment.
Seay had no timetable for phase two, saying he is in negotiations now with potential retailers. While he declined to cite specific retailers, Seay said other future tenants may include two shoe retailers, a golf store, three “soft goods” retailers, and numerous shops.
Major retailers involved in the phase-one renovations include Circuit City, which is moving into 34,000 square feet of rebuilt space in the area Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse is leaving; Linens N’ Things, which will move into 35,000 square feet across the parking lot from Circuit City; and The Honey Baked Ham Co., which is leasing 5,000 square feet in the western corner of the existing shopping center.
Construction has already started on the former Allied Sporting Goods site, which will house an expanded, 14,000-square-foot Disc Jockey store and on the space to be leased by Honey Baked Ham.
Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse expects to close by the end of this weekend, at it will move to the former site of bigg’s Hypermarket in Middletown Station, another retail center owned by Hagan Properties.
Seay said the former Burlington store space will be demolished this month.
Honey Baked Ham and Disc Jockey both are scheduled to open in November, prior to the Christmas shopping season, but Hawley-Cooke, Circuit City, Linens N’ Things and Wild Oats are not scheduled to open their new locations until after the first of the year.
Wild Oats, which describes itself as a natural-foods grocery store, plans to open its store in May 2001.
Wild Oats “has been looking at Louisville for a while” as a possible location for a new store, said Freya Brier, vice president, legal, and general counsel for the Boulder, Colo.-based company. “There’s a vibrant market (in Louisville) … market where people want a little education with their grocery shopping.”
Brier said Wild Oats stores offer an alternative to conventional foods at traditional supermarkets. The stores feature café seating, a juice and coffee bar, a massage therapist and a large supply of vitamins and supplements.
The company recently opened “very successful” stores in the Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio areas, and also has three stores in Tennessee, said Brier.
The company currently owns and operates 115 stores in the United States and Canada and reports companywide sales of $800 million. Brier said the company has no plans to pen other Louisville-area stores, but is considering locations across the state of Kentucky.
Ron Feldman, vice president of real estate for Wild Oats, called Louisville “A sophisticated market that is underserved. It has excellent education and income levels and a high-quality and upbeat demographic.”
Feldman said his company chose Shelbyville Road Plaza because the “location is in the epicenter of retail.” He added that expressway and neighborhood access were factors in the decision as well. “We want to make it as easy as possible for people to do their grocery shopping,” he said.
Louisville-based Hawley-Cooke is relocating to renovated, larger space in the multilevel former Evans Furniture Store, Schuetze said. The store plans to move to its new location in February.
“We’re very, very excited,” Schuetze said. He said the new Hawley-Cooke will be a “21st century, state-of-the-art store.”
Hawley-Cooke’s existing store has between 22,000 and 23,000 square feet. The new location will be 27,000 square feet.
The additional space will allow Hawley-Cooke to add to its product mix with offerings such as electronic books, said Schuetze. The store still will sell books, music, periodicals and gifts, as do the other two Hawley-Cooke stores her.
There will also be “a food element,” Schuetze said, but plans have not yet been set. The current location has a full-service restaurant. “There’s nothing chiseled in stone yet.”
Schuetze said Hawley-Cooke will close for a “very short amount of time” to relocate from the old to the new location. “I don’t think we can move it overnight.”
Circuit City is leaving its Theirman Lane location to open a new store in the plaza next summer, said Jim Babb, manager of communications and media relations at the chain’s Richmond, Va., headquarters.
“It will be a new design, a store of the future, with the latest in electronics and home furnishings,” Babb said.
The new store’s design reflects Circuit City’s decision to drop its appliances products line and to expand its selection of personal computers, imaging products, peripherals and software, according to a company news release on its Web site.
Babb said the new design is appearing first in stores in Florida, and “the new model is stunning, from what people have said.”
Cincinnati-based Honey Baked Ham is closing a stand-alone store it leases at 7619 Shelbyville Road, across from Oxmoor Center, and moving to 5,000 square feet of new and renovated space in Shelbyville Road Plaza this fall, said Mark Spiros, director of real estate and construction for the 250-store chain. The targeted opening date is Dec. 1 for the new location.
“We’ll have Thanksgiving at the old store; Christmas at the new store,” Spiros said.
The main reason for the move is “to get additional parking for out customers,” Spiros said.
But the new location also will allow better accessibility for “large corporate pick-ups,” which are a significant part of Honey Baked’s Louisville operation, he said, as well as give it increased visibility because of customers drawn by the surrounding tenants.
Disc Jockey, which is moving across the parking lot into the former Allied store, plans to open its new location in early November, a company spokesman told Business First last week.
Daymon Ward, leasing and real estate manager at Disc Jockey’s corporate office in Owensboro, Ky., said last week that the new store will have and extra 2,000 square feet and will feature a new cappuccino bar and an expanded classical music selection.
According to Seay, demolition on Disc Jockey’s existing space will start in December. Existing merchants whose stores will be otherwise untouched by the renovation and expansion still will be part of a total façade renovation, Seay said.
The façade was last renovated when the Louisville partnership bought out this week purchased the mall in 1991.