hospitalitystyle.com

Danbury Fair’s food court plays up a park-like setting to lure lifestyle shoppers attracted by hot new retail tenants.

By Val Hunt

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It would take window shoppers a number of repeat visits to Danbury Fair mall to reach visual satiety. They can glimpse the full spectrum of the hottest lifestyle retail brands, whether it's Sephora's make-up counters, Metropark's clothing or Williams-Sonoma's housewares. After a day of trend-spotting, it's not surprising that denizens of the material world expect more from the adjoining food court than just another Formica fortress with lightweight chairs and undersized tables. Macerich, owner and manager of the 1.3-million-square-foot regional shopping center in southwest Connecticut's affluent Fairfield County, saw an opportunity to ring up higher sales with a park-like design concept that makes the food court as "must-see" as the stores.

 Moving the food court upmarket is part of management's strategy to change Danbury Fair's profile. "The mall is experiencing some new upscale tenancy," says David Piper, vice president of design and planning for Santa Monica, Calif.-based Macerich. "We wanted the food court to be up to par with the feel of the rest of the mall."

 

How This Garden Grew

Transitioning the standard mall food court into a dining experience that could hold its own with high-wattage retail brands started with a simple photograph. "Looking at the food court, I saw an open, airy, sky-lit space. It made me think of a photo of the New York Botanical Garden, and that became the basis of the redesign," says Nick Igel, principal of 505Design Inc., the Boulder, Colo.-based firm Macerich hired to redesign the food court.

The first step in the shift from institutional to inviting was to reconfigure the space. A meeting of management, the design team and the food court tenants resulted in a "less-is-more" compromise. The number of seats was reduced from about 900 to 750, and five tenants were cut from the lineup to reduce competition among the remaining 11 food court vendors.

"The new structure of the food court is a carve-out between the tenant space and the seating space," says Piper. "We reduced the number of tenants so that we could curve the food court into the retail space and make it more connected with the restaurants and the shops."  The remaining tenants benefit from increased visibility. The eateries are now arranged in a panoramic-style to give them a better visual presence as the food court curves out and flows into the rest of the mall.