LAGUNA HILLS, CA—As GlobeSt.com reported recently, Nadel hascompleted the $17-million expansion of the Village at Nellie Gail Ranch,a shopping center located at the intersection ofMoulton Pkwy. and La Paz Rd. here. The extensive remodel andexpansion project incorporated 28,000 additional square feet ofretail space. We spoke with GregLyon, principal and design director for Nadel, about howarchitect and design firms are approaching shopping-centerrepositioning and how bricks-and-mortar storeshave made peace with online shopping.

GlobeSt.com: It seems that repositioning is makingup a huge percentage of shopping-center development. How arearchitecture and planning firms like yours approaching theseprojects?

Lyon: Nadel survived because ofclients repositioning assets. Fortunately, we are also seeing aswell of more ground-up projects happening becauseof all the retail space that was absorbed by food and athleticconcepts during the recession. At first, we saidredevelopment was simply a reimaging job, but wesoon realized it was more of a real estate challenge than a designchallenge. There were three main categories of redevelopment: 1.some clients had a big box that was empty and were trying to divideit up if they couldn't get a single tenant; 2. some clients hadempty shop space within a center; and 3. others had underperformingassets. They all wanted to do everything as economically aspossible. With the big box, it was like a jigsaw puzzle that wecould reduce to reasonable-sized shop space. For empty shop spacewithin a center, the strategy was to come up with a creativeconcept that the brokers could take to market and the tenants couldwrap their brains around, like a Kid Zone where the tenants wereall kid or family focused. That districting created a story thatwould allow brokers to go to market and sell something with acritical mass of visitation. The third issue of underperformingassets was more expensive and challenging—it might be a 30-year-oldcenter across the street from brand-new one that had to beaggressively repositioned for a lifestyle feel. It's an expensiveendeavor, and we're still following that now.