CHESHIRE, CT-WS Development said late last week it plans to build a 500,000-square-foot outlet center in this New Haven County town, in a revival of a plan first announced in 2006. Reportedly budgeted at $100 million-plus, the complex would eventually include a residential component, Chestnut Hill, MA-based WS said.
Now known as the Outlets at Cheshire, the project originally was approved by the Cheshire Town Council in 2007, the Cheshire Citizen newspaper reported in February. As the housing bubble began deflating and retail demand soured, the project was put on hold, Louis Masiello, VP of development at WS, told the paper, although the company has kept the master plan active and maintained the contract rights to develop the 100-acre site.
“The demand had been very much slowed down,” Masiello was quoted as saying in February. “But over the last year we've started to see it resurge.”
Mark Roberts, SVP of leasing at WS, takes up a similar theme in a release announcing the project. “The decision to build a destination outlet center is in large part due to the very strong retail interest in the project and the success of outlet centers today,” Roberts says in the release. “With its convenient highway location and super regional access, the project is perfectly positioned within the state for outlet retail.” It will be located at the interchange of I-684 and I-691 along Route 10 in the town's Interchange Zone.
WS expects to launch construction on the outlet center in early 2014, with a projected opening of summer 2015. The residential component would include about 140 townhomes, and WS likely would bring in another party to handle that aspect of the development, Masiello told the Citizen in February.
The developer previously has built seven retail centers in Connecticut, and also has developed properties in Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island as well as in Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Yet well over half its 78 projects are in the Greater Boston area, where WS is headquartered.
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