More shops and restaurants coming to Shoppes at Fashion Square
The California firm that bought Shoppes at Fashion Square last year is moving forward with more plans for more shops and restaurants in the center abutting to the struggling mall on Colonial Drive.
LBX Investments will follow the opening this month of Del Taco with two new retail buildings on shovel-ready pads bookending the mall entrance off Maguire Boulevard. LBX Investments bought the Floor & Décor-anchored shopping center from Seritage Growth Properties last May for $25.7 million.
Managing Partner Rob Levy told GrowthSpotter that new construction was always part of the plan for the asset. “We feel strongly about Floor & Décor as an anchor for the project, and we want to build around them,” he said. “So certainly had the idea and strategy to build a few outparcels and also to complete the tenancy at Floor & Décor.”
Levy said they’d like to start construction as soon as possible. LBX filed an administrative master plan seeking approval for a 4,584-square-foot building with two storefronts on Pad 5, just north of Longhorn Steakhouse. The slightly larger second building is slated for Pad 1 and is designed with three storefronts, including an end-cap space suitable for a restaurant or brewery.
“There’s nothing definitive in the tenancy yet,” Levy said. “We’re working with a number of potential prospects.”
Nicholas Fouracre with 4Acre Commercial manages the leasing activity for the property.
Kimley Horn is the project engineer and SA Group LLC is the architect.
The master plan also includes the final buildout of the shell space from Orchard Supply Hardware. The building was never occupied when parent company Lowe’s abandoned the boutique brand in 2018 and shuttered all 99 stores across the nation, including three in Orlando.
Floor & Décor took nearly 30,000 square feet of the building, which included 7,788 square feet of mezzanine space. A new 8,826-square-foot storefront would be carved out of the existing building, along with another 5,893 square feet of covered space in what was the garden center for the hardware building.
The expansion comes while Unicorp National Developments CEO Chuck Whittall is working with mall owner Bancorp on a redevelopment plan for the Fashion Square property, the city’s oldest mall.
“For about a year and a half we’ve been negotiating with them to co-develop the property, but everything’s just been on hold because of the market right now,” Whittall said. “The costs are so high, it just doesn’t make sense to do anything at this moment.”
Whittall and investor/broker Daryl Carter bought the 46-acre mall property in 2019 for $23 million but for years couldn’t come to terms with Bancorp, which owns the actual mall building, to buy out the lease. In 2021 the Delaware bank brought in its own development team, New Jersey-based M&M Realty, to create a plan for the property. Bancorp won approval from the city that year for the framework master plan that called for demolishing everything except the Macy’s store and an existing parking garage. The plan included 177,000 square feet of new retail and dining uses, including two restaurant pads fronting on Colonial, a 120-room hotel, 1,400 residential units, two new parking garages and a central event lawn with a pavilion.
The project never advanced beyond the master plan approval.
Whittall had similar ideas for reactivating the site back in 2018. His initial concept included a four different apartment buildings, all five-stories with ground-floor retail, a hotel and a grocery store.