Indoor shopping malls are one of the great achievements of late-capitalist cultures and one of their most consistent burdens.
They represent everything good about living in a land of plenty: endless consumer choice, quality goods, fair business practices, with free and equal access for all. But they are, by and large, bruises on the urban landscape, ugly blocks of windowless buildings, set in seas of asphalt and plopped right down in the middle of things. Malls bring us together on the inside, but destroy our connectivity on the outside.
The goes a long way to fix that problem. It’s a massive retail build-out — 70,000 square feet of new construction — that changes the face of the region’s most-iconic retail haven.
The style won’t please everyone, which is understandable. The RH store — it used to be — is an indulgent exercise in branding that puts the cash register ahead of innovative design. It’s as subtle as a Las Vegas casino.
But as a piece of architecture, it plays an important role by linking various parts of a developing section of town. Rather than sitting back from the street, hiding behind a barrier of white-lined parking spaces, it comes right up to busy First Avenue and greets it with not just one door, but 13 of them — all 9-foot-tall, double French doors. There are seven more doors on each of the structure’s other two protruding sides, and the effect, at least visually, is to make the building part of the Cherry Creek streetscape.
The new addition, on the mall’s north side near where the blocky Saks Fifth Avenue department store formerly stood, actually works to connect the entire shopping center — more than 1 million square feet — to the neighborhood. The mall’s prison walls have come down, replaced by a welcoming front door at the sidewalk.
This comes at crucial time in Cherry Creek’s history. Across First Avenue, in Cherry Creek North, there is . The neighborhood, long known as a quaint shopping village with squat, two-story storefronts, is swelling into a sea of high-rise glass and steel, with new office buildings, condominiums, hotels and apartments.
Not everyone likes the change, but it’s unstoppable at this point, and it will transform Cherry Creek North — stretching from First to Third Avenue, between University Boulevard and Steele Street — from a high-end consumer mecca to a place where thousands of people live, work and recreate. There are more than 1,400 residential units under construction or planned, and 3,000 new people are expected to move in. Hundreds of new hotel rooms are due soon, too.
The combination of apartment living, restaurants and retail will probably create what every city wants most — increased pedestrian traffic. And that’s where a mall with a front door on the street could make a huge difference. It invites walk-ins rather than just parkers.
There has always been a huge divide between Cherry Creek North and the Cherry Creek Shopping Center — and this is one step toward bridging it, making the mall a less obnoxious element of the civic environment.
Of course, people will have to be lured across the busy boulevard to the mall, and that’s where the RH store’s design, by the firm Backen, Gillam & Kroeger, might have been more helpful. It’s reminiscent of a grand Mediterranean palazzo, with arched windows, Juliet balconies and courtyards set behind stone. It relies heavily on old-fashioned symmetry, from its urn-topped gate to its sharp-edged cornices.
Mediterranean palaces are lovely in, say, Italy, even after all these years. In Cherry Creek, they read as a bit of nonsense, a pandering toward prettiness rooted in nothing. Romantic, perhaps to some, but gimmicky, like a theme restaurant. There are other retro places like this in the area, mostly townhomes, but they represent its past, not its future.
Inside, the store is a tomb of taupe. Its floors are concrete and its walls are shades of putty. Walking in, everything appears to be on steroids: oversized light fixtures, vases and mirrors, 11-foot sectional sofas with cushions nearly a yard deep.
This is not merchandise that an average person with a normal-sized house might see as practical, although shoppers do manage to figure out how RH merchandise makes their lives richer: The Corte Madera, Calif.-based chain has 69 stores in the U.S. and Canada and $1.9 billion in annual sales, a figure the company hopes to at least double in two years. Customers love the consistent good taste of its sofas and coffee tables, which often blend traditional materials with modern lines.
The store’s exterior is a billboard of sorts for that style, although, at four stories, it lacks the subtle grace that can make, say, an RH wall sconce the best thing in a bathroom.
And it’s out of sync with its surroundings, both the hardscaped mall behind it, and the new construction surrounding it. More than any other section of Denver, Cherry Creek North has survived the city’s building explosion with style. It’s a true success story, starting with the chic mixed-use development that houses Crate & Barrel and continuing with the sleek, stone-and-steel residences at the North Creek development nearby.
The neighborhood is moving forward with the times. Building things that are relevant, that make people feel good about dining there and sleeping there, and pushing the entire city to look harder at what goes up.
In some ways, the new RH store moves forward with it; in others, it feels like the past.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or @rayrinaldi
