Retail

A shopping centre is not a box full of tenants, it is a piece of city that has to work every day, at peak hours and outside them. We design retail starting from the visitor experience: how people enter, what they see from the first step, how easily they understand where they need to go, and why they come back. Retail, entertainment, the food court, offices and housing are held together by clear circulation, daylight and points of interest that invite you to walk.

Shopping centres, extensions and conversions

We have worked at almost every scale of the programme, from stores and concept stores of 2,000 sqm to mixed-use schemes above 60,000 sqm. The extension of Arena Mall Bacău took the centre from 42,000 to around 63,000 sqm and added a theme park of roughly 10 hectares, terraces opening onto the lake and the city's first international chain hotel, for a flow of more than 3 million visitors a year. At MegaMall Bucharest, Timișoara Shopping City and the City Park Mall Constanța extension we worked inside operating centres, where the construction site has to coexist with daily trading.

Designing for retailers and concept stores

Designing for retailers has its own discipline: brand standards that must be respected without clashing with local planning rules. We have delivered Primark stores in Romania and REWE concept stores in protected areas, where every move on the facade is negotiated with the historic context. We have also carried out conversions, from 2,000 to over 20,000 sqm, transforming spaces that had lost their original use.

Building services and fire safety

Technically, a shopping centre is a building services and fire safety programme at least as much as it is an architectural one. The fire safety strategy, evacuation, smoke extraction, deliveries and staff routes are established together with the geometry, not after it. We coordinate architecture, structure, building services and interiors in the same office, and during fit-out we work directly with the tenants' technical teams.

GLA, tenant mix and budget

GLA, tenant mix and budget are design inputs for us, not constraints imposed from outside. We discuss lettable area, unit depth, shopfronts, anchor positions and the way the mix can be reconfigured five years from now early on, because a centre that cannot adapt ages quickly.

To that we add sustainability: low running costs, daylight in the malls, rainwater management, materials that are easy to maintain. The operating cost of a shopping centre is decided at design stage and paid for twenty years.

In retail, quality shows in the details that never appear in a rendering: joints, thresholds, junctions, service zones. If you are preparing a new shopping centre, an extension or a conversion, write to us.