San Ramon, CA
Marketplace at San Ramon
2019
by TRC Retail
A departing grocery anchor and an awkward, hard-to-lease vacancy, solved with two different strategies:
a reshaped building for Trader Joe's, and a mixed-use pivot to multifamily housing for what retail leasing alone couldn't fill.
The Problem :
Overall, the center's uniform brick architecture blended into the monotonous background instead of standing out at its high-visibility intersection.
Meanwhile, the center's longtime grocery anchor, Nob Hill Foods, gave notice — leaving nearly half the center's leasable space vacant, and the property without a grocery store.
Bringing in Trader Joe's solved two problems at once: it filled the a longstanding, awkwardly shaped vacant space, and it restored the grocery anchor the center needed.
That still left the Nob Hill Foods parcel, over 16 acres of land, vacant and unlikely to be replaced in the modern retail leasing environment. As a solution, we decided to incorporate mixed-uses into the property, by pivoting that empty parcel to multifamily housing.
One grocery anchor lost, one awkward vacancy left behind
Rather than force one solution to fit three very different problems,
the departing grocery anchor, the shopping center improvements,
and the awkward leftover vacancy were solved separately
— a reshaped building for a new grocery user,
a mixed-use pivot for the space that retail leasing was never going to fill,
all wrapped together with a common area refresh throughout the property.
The
: Strategy
Two vacancies, two different fixes
Reshaped for Trader Joe's
Partial demolition
paired with a modest expansion
turned an oddly shaped,
hard-to-lease building into
a conventional, grocery-ready space — with a new exterior
in metal panels, glass,
and navy blue that broke
from the center's uniform brick.
The Improvements:
A reshaped building,
& a second act for the space next door
To extend the new life the Trader Joe’s was giving the surrounding shopping center, select buildings coated in red brick exterior facades were painted, white, black, and navy blue to give some visual contrast across the property while maintaining the consistency of a coordinated paint scheme.
Refreshed Building Exteriors
Nob Hill Foods Vacancy → to Housing
We began the feasibility studies and initial entitlement work to pivot the separate, hard-to-lease vacancy to multifamily housing instead of forcing another retail tenant into a space that wasn't built for one.
In the years since, the project is now approved and expected to break ground soon.
The Results:
A new anchor,
An Enhanced Look,
& Another project already in motion
The Nob Hill Foods closed and was quickly replaced with another grocery tenant the community was genuinely excited about, meanwhile foot traffic increased as shoppers came specifically for the new store,
and also spent at the adjacent retailers visited onsite as well.
The distinct new architecture also gave the center a stronger visual identity at a prominent intersection where it had previously blended in, thus attracting more travelers to the site regularly.
Separately, the multifamily housing initiative is now approved and expected to break ground soon — bringing a new, complementary use, as well as a new dependable customer base, to the center; thus solving a problem by mixing uses in a way that a simple retail leasing strategy wasn't going to solve alone.
