After more than a decade in the making, Westfield London has finally opened. It is difficult to know where to begin.
Do you start with the fact that it has brought 1.6 million sq ft (148,600 sq m) of new shopping space to London? Or that it opened in the week when Bank of England governor Mervyn King admitted recession is no longer speculation but fact? Or the raft of issues retailers have had with Westfield over the fitting out of their stores? Or perhaps the never ending speculation about this giant shopping centre’s likely effect on the West End?
Ahead of its opening, Westfield London posed more questions than it brought answers, some likely to linger for a while. But retailers present on opening day concurred that the centre is a remarkable achievement that will change shopping in London for good.
The opening certainly had more panache than any other centre to have opened this year. While the live models in La Senza’s window, celebrity appearances from Leona Lewis, Danni Minogue, the Sugababes and the capital’s mayor Boris Johnson caught the eye of the 160,000 opening day shoppers, retailers were struck by the quality of what both the developer and their rivals had achieved.
“It looks very good,” Sir Philip Green told Retail Week. “Everybody has put their best foot forward.”
Reiss founder David Reiss agreed. “The one thing that impresses me about Westfield London is that everybody has raised their game. It’s going to be one of the key centres in Europe,” he said.
Shoppers were also impressed. “It’s fantastic,” said Stella Spalding from Fulham. “You’ve got every single shop here you could wish for. The only negative is there’s an awful lot of high-end shops that are out of range of a lot of people.”
It takes a bold developer to try to alter the retail landscape in London, but Westfield has done just that. The list of retailers is as long as it is striking, even putting luxury area The Village to one side. With an 80 per cent fashion focus, the majority of high street retailers are there, from value players such as H&M to the higher end of the mid-market such as G-Star and Replay.
But the one thing these stores have in common is that all the retailers have pushed the boat out with their store fit-outs. Westfield has a familiar but smarter feel compared with most shopping centres. The most noticeable negative was the fact that only half the stores in its much-lauded luxury area were trading.
Westfield group managing director Steven Lowy admits Westfield was “upset” that Louis Vuitton was not there on the opening day, but pointed out that this was because chief executive Bernard Arnault wanted a bigger store. About 80 per cent of stores were trading on opening day and while some doubted the centre would make it, Lowy says he was not one of them.
“Most punters wouldn’t have thought we’d make today, but I never doubted it,” he says. He attributes this to the very experienced team of Westfield lifers who ran the development of the project, but says: “It’s not an Aussie spirit – that’s too parochial.”
Stamping its style
Westfield’s style is certainly different to the traditional UK shopping centre developer. There have been complaints about bureaucratic processes and the level of Westfield’s involvement in store design. Lowy is unapologetic. “We take a lot more interest in what the shops ultimately look like than our peers. We have a very large team of tenancy designers and in many cases that causes some conflict, but at the end of the day they earn huge respect because people see we think like a retailer as well,” he explains.
Westfield set out to put its stamp on the site from the off. When it bought property company Chelsfield in 2004, which brought with it the site that was then known as White City, construction was already under way. That did not stop Westfield ripping up the original plans and coming up with a completely new design.
“The whole retail planning was very poor in our view,” says Lowy. “There were no escalators – we now have 96 – and no air conditioning.”
UK and Europe managing director Michael Gutman says the retailers that signed up for the development rose to the challenge the developer set. “Very early on we took a look at this and said we would do something special, and the retailers here have all done something special. If you look around the concepts that are here I couldn’t count the number of flagship stores that are here or the retailers that have chosen Westfield London to make a statement,” he says.
Still, you can’t add 1.6 million sq ft of new retail space to a city such as London without expecting to ruffle a few feathers. It is too early to judge the impact of this new arrival on the West End, but more immediately in the firing line are a number of smaller retail areas outside the centre of the capital.
With access from three underground stations – one built for the centre and one refurbished for it – plus a mainline station and 4,500 parking spaces, getting to Westfield should not be difficult. Marks & Spencer chairman Sir Stuart Rose says he hopes its arrival will energise efforts to revamp the West End and, in particular, get the traffic out of Oxford Street. “Oxford Street needs to be regenerated,” he said at the centre opening. “If you ask the man in the street what he wants, he would say he doesn’t want to be run over.”
Westfield has generated huge excitement, but with consumers tightening purse strings retailers can’t just rely on the centre’s novelty value and will still need to work to convert visits into sales. And while luxury retailers such as Louis Vuitton, Tiffany and Prada are a coup for Westfield, the resilience of the luxury market is also up for debate.
But building shopping centres is a long-term game. Although the timing might not be ideal, Westfield has done its job and attracted a spectacular array of retailers to what is a world-class centre. When the economy and consumer spending eventually start to improve, it will be well established.
Gutman believes that Westfield London will “turn on its head people’s conception of what a mall really is”. In three years’ time it will seek to transform retail at the opposite end of the city, in Stratford. And if it continues to deliver the shoppers in White City, the problems that preceded last week’s opening will soon be forgotten.
Butlers Chocolate Café
Finally off the mark in the UK, Butlers Chocolate Café was doing a roaring trade on opening day. The Irish café-cum-konditorei format is well known in the Republic of Ireland and there was not a spare seat in this open-fronted unit. The large, circular bevelled mirror behind the serving counter helps make the space seem larger and is keeping with the somewhat turn-of-the-century feel that characterises the fit-out of this store.
The brown and beige colour scheme adds to the reassuring sense that this is a retailer for which traditional values prevail.
Foyles
One of the more disappointing stores is Foyles, which was ominously empty on a day when thousands of shoppers filled the mall. The two-floor bookshop has a large footprint with stripped wood bookcases throughout. Much of the stock is tabled and, in fairness, Foyles has resisted the temptation to put in linear rows of library-style shelving, opting instead to create curved fixtures along the perimeter. The problem is, this is a generally bland execution and even the double-height glass frontage only serves to provide views into a featureless interior.
Zara
The prince of mid-market fashion put on a regal display. UK and Ireland managing director Stefano Sutter was enthusiastic. “This is the best [store] we have at the moment. Maybe when Stratford comes along [the shopping development planned for 2010] we’ll do something like this,” he said. Sutter pointed out the storefront, which features a series of brown sunburst-style elements and a double iteration of the silver logo. Internally, the usual attention to detail is apparent, with womenswear on the ground floor, and a dark menswear department and Zara Kids on the first.
No Name
The curiously named No Name, a Greek fashion retailer making Westfield its first UK port of call, delivers a dramatic store interior based on circles that recede into the shop. A large circular screen with a hole cut into it forms a tunnel-like entrance to this men’s fashion shop, with the shape being echoed in the form of white arcs extending from floor to ceiling deeper into the store. With its white ceiling and red accent wall, coupled with two simple graphics, this is an appealing interior. No Name also operates a women’s store in the centre.
Micro Anvika
Technology retailer Micro Anvika unveiled a new look for its Westfield debut. With its treble-height frontage using white entrance pillars complete with recessed product niches, the soaring wooden fascia, set back from the mall and providing a view deep into the store, this is a dramatic design. A series of overhead white baffles takes the eye to the back of the shop where Anvika has installed a neon logo set against a wall covered with a printed circuit-board graphic. In the mid-floor area, white cubes have been deployed as product displays.
Desigual
A crowd of Spanish management types were standing deep inside the Desigual store discussing the finer points of the design and merchandising of the childrenswear area. Perhaps they were being tough critics but it is hard to find fault with the Barcelona-based fashion retailer’s second UK outing. This store is a sensory overload, with everything from Moorish deep blue and turquoise tiling around parts of the perimeter, to video screens and mock-clothes lines at the entrance. All of this, with graffiti-style graphics and high- and low-level lighting, make it a dramatic experience.
Fornarina
The only real UK comparison with this store is the Italian fashion retailer’s Carnaby Street branch in London’s West End - which is completely different in almost every aspect from this store. The black walls and dark floor tiles, as well as a shocking-pink catwalk that runs down the centre of the shop, make for a trashy-chic environment. Even the visual merchandising propping, with inflatable champagne bottles set into niches around the perimeter and flooded with pink light and lurid light boxes, serve to foster the sense of walking into a nightclub.
Replay
A restrained offering from fashion brand Replay, which normally features highly contemporary interiors. Instead, Replay has created a store design where the major notes are struck by wood and glass, with an opulent white light chandelier on the left-hand side of the shop. Replay has adopted a more is less approach to merchandising, with large amounts of circulation space. There is an extravagant use of space for the jeans wall at the back of the shop, where the upper levels of the shelving are filled with books in an attempt to create a library-style ambiance.
Ugg
From early on, cult Australian boot and comfy shoe brand Ugg was full of shoppers seeing whether they could afford what was on display or whether there were elements of the ranges they were unaware of. The store itself was startlingly different from shoe retailing norms with a wave-shaped ceiling, a perimeter with frosted glass boxes for shoe displays, and exposed brick walls. This is not a store where shoppers will find racks of shoes, but then the price of the stock probably means that rather more is expected of the store environment. Ugg did not disappoint.
Ted Baker
With neon greyhounds, reminiscent of the exterior of the former Walthamstow dog track, stuffed hares suspended from a fake grass ceiling and mock-Victorian ceiling mouldings, this could only be Ted Baker. Founder and chief executive Ray Kelvin was on hand, claiming that he didn’t know where the inspiration for his stores came from, but that his being “mad” had much to do with the form they take. Whatever the truth, this is the most off-beat store in the mall and shoppers were beating a path to its door… and probably not just because free champagne was on offer.
Timberland
Possibly the most dramatic exterior of any store at Westfield is the log cabin on acid look of the Timberland store, which features massive, asymmetric pieces of wood into which glass panels have been inserted. This really is an example of a brand making its promise a reality and almost every piece of the internal shopfit has been created from recycled wood. A rough and ready frontier feel characterises the interior, with everything from cobblers’ lasts – used as a perimeter display – to picnic bench tables in the mid-shop. Rugged looking males (and females) were spotted in-store.
Uniqlo
We may all be getting used to the bright visual merchandising shock tactics that are the Uniqlo norm, but the coupling of relatively low prices and razor sharp displays still make this a must-visit proposition. Uniqlo at Westfield has taken full advantage of its double-height frontage, with the door set back from the two floor-to-ceiling windows that are simply merchandised from top to bottom with mannequins set against a black backdrop. Internally, this is a deep store, but the gaze never flags as carefully orchestrated table and wall displays fill the space.
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