Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
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r e t a i l i n g t o d a y Reaching higher design within reach is redesigning and adding home-furnishings stores W By Ian Ritter hilE thE tREND these days is for retailers to downsize their stores, home-furnishings chain Design Within Reach is decidedly upsizing. the upscale chain is accustomed to squeezing its wares into small corners, but now it seeks more square footage. With stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, the 41-unit operator is looking to boost its count at the rate of about five stores per year. A new management team, unhappy with much of the chain's current real estate, wants to revitalize the brand with flashier Within Reach. they closed down the chain's smaller stores, which measured about 3,100 square feet, and introduced three new prototypes, measuring 10,000, 15,000 and 20,000 square feet. the company wants to open these larger stores in cities where it already has a presence. Sayigh & Duman, a New York City architecture firm, designed the new store models. the Stamford, Conn.–based chain opened the first of these last year, a 20,000-square-foot store at the newly renovated South Coast Collection design center, in Costa Mesa, Calif., where it operates among other upper-end home-furnishings outlets. in New York City's Soho district, meanwhile, a difficult neighborhood for any retailer seeking a large space, the company doubled the size of its existing store to 9,000 square feet. it also relocated its Miami store from South Beach to the Design District, a neighborhood better suited to the company's base of high- spaces that better showcase its high-end offerings. Design Within Reach executives have already been hard at work on this strategy, and a flagship set to open this month on New York City's Upper East Side is their blueprint for the future. John Edelman, the company's CEO, and John McPhee, the COO, took over Design Within Reach in 2009, after the previous management delisted from Nasdaq. Edelman and McPhee had been admirers of the Design Within Reach brand for quite a while, so they sold the leather business they had at the time to take a chance on renewing Design 16 SC t / J a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 DESIGN WITHIN REACH'S FIFTH NEW YoR CITY SToRE oPENS THIS moNTH. THE RETAILER HAS SToRES IN 20 STATES, PLuS ToRoNTo AND mExICo.