Coworking space with child care, gyms and even dog care is floated as a possible new use of former Lord & Taylor store at Westfarms

Hartford Courant - 8/9/2021

Where department store customers once bought clothing and housewares at the Westfarms shopping mall, office workers could one day arrive at their desks and also take advantage of amenities such as gyms and massages.

A Canadian company is floating the idea of transforming a former Lord & Taylor store into a 121,000-square-foot coworking space. It’s the latest sign of how developers and employers are rethinking the future of shopping centers and offices.

Lord & Taylor, which sought bankruptcy protection last year and shut three Connecticut stores, including its site at Westfarms, is being eyed by the Hudson’s Bay Co., once a Canadian fur trader and now a retail business group. Similar plans for Danbury, Stamford and Trumbull also have been made public.

The Hudson’s Bay Co., or HBC, has branded York Factory — named for an 18th century settlement and Hudson’s Bay Co. center of trading — for its workplace development projects. HBC describes itself as a holding company of investments and businesses that operate “at the intersection of technology, retail operations and real estate.”

A proposal for the Westfarms mall has not been submitted to the Farmington Building Department. Representatives of HBC and Westfarms mall declined to comment.

“Nothing is imminent,” said Michael Puzzo, a senior vice president at CBRE Group Inc., which is marketing the space. “This was pre-pandemic so the timing didn’t work out well.”

While a prime use for the former Lord & Taylor site is potential office space, several other functions are possible. Developers have shown that office and retail space can work together, Puzzo said.

“Hudson’s Bay is very flexible,” Puzzo said.

York Factory’s promotional material for the former Lord & Taylor said plans include an “adaptive re-use” of the two-story building, adding windows, a central atrium and sky lights.

Amenities include dinners, sports teams, happy hours, speaker series, group fitness classes and training seminars.

And a physical and mental wellness center would offer yoga and meditation, saunas, gyms and changing areas, child care and even dog care.

Analyst Burt Flickinger, managing director at Strategic Resource Group, said HBC is “one of the more strategically astute modern shopping center owners, real estate aggregators and retailers.”

It’s advancing previously executed plans to rework shopping malls. Shopping centers have sought to rejuvenate themselves with on-site entertainment and video games and relaxed restrictive covenants that allow BJ’s Wholesale Club Wholesale Corp. to operate at the shopping centers, he said.

Community colleges, too, have been established at several malls.

An “accelerated retail ice age” has eliminated as much as 40% of U.S. retail in the last decade, Flickinger said.

Combining a re-use of offices and retail space fixes problems affecting both functions. Even before the pandemic, many malls were struggling as anchor stores such as Sears, JC Penney and Lord & Taylor pulled out, taking customers with them.

At the same time, offices were emptied by COVID-19, forcing managers to figure out when to allow workers to return. Many companies that had planned to return to the office in the fall are now putting off plans because of the strength of the delta variant.

Stephen Singer can be reached at ssinger@courant.com.