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West Elm, a member of Williams-Sonoma, Inc. portfolio of brands, will open a brand-new location inside the revitalized Uptown Plaza shopping center in the heart of central Phoenix (252 E. Camelback Road). Scheduled to open this summer inside a stylish, brick-lined 11,001 sq.-ft. space, this is West Elm’s first Phoenix store and second Arizona location for the Brooklyn-based company.
Courtesy: West Elm
West Elm at Uptown Plaza plans to bring approximately 30 jobs to the neighborhood. A selection of Arizona-based makers and designers will sell their products in the store’s assortment of modern furnishings and décor as part of the West Elm LOCAL program. Additionally, West Elm at Uptown Plaza will offer West Elm Style + Services to support customers in their journey to express their personal style at home. For store opening updates and information follow @westelmphoenix on Instagram.
Courtesy: West Elm.
Overseen by the Valley-based real estate development and investment firm, Vintage Partners, Uptown Plaza is a restored midcentury modern gem at the NE corner of Camelback Road and Central Avenue. Aside from the all-new West Elm store, Uptown Plaza’s longtime grocery store, AJ’s Fine Foods will also start construction on a wall-to-wall renovation and refresh later this year as the final phase of a years-long, multi-million dollar refresh and revitalization that has restored this historic neighborhood shopping center as the urban heartbeat of the Uptown Phoenix area.
This is wonderful news… as 7th Street’s food and beverage offerings become a bit over-saturated and have issues with parking, it’ll be interesting to see how Uptown Plaza continues to improve. Personally, I’d love to see them build a parking garage of 4-6 floors underground where their parking lot is, then build more ground floor retail and then build 6-9 stories of apartments/condos above… this would do a few things: 1) get rid of an unsightly surface parking area, 2) provide more parking as parking is starting to become an issue at Uptown Plaza – I recently circled around that parking lot for 20 minutes trying to find a space, 3) provide more retail for the area, and 4) with a lot of housing above the retail, this would provide built-in, year-round business for the retail tenants below… think of Santana Row in San Jose… or The Grove in Los Angeles… this could be just as successful, and more sales per square foot on the 1st floor because of the added residential means the ability to charge higher lease costs per square foot since the businesses will be making a lot more money per square foot.
Next up is 7th Avenue – a lot about to happen there – and the rumor is that the Hotel 502 is about to build a lot of housing on their site, cut the hotel from 165 rooms to about 50 rooms, and re-brand the hotel as “The Melrose” by December… stay tuned for more information on that project…
Then, the focus should move to Park Central… I hope that it’s planned in an “X” shape – with the “X” being the pedestrian linkage from St Joe’s to Central and Osborn Metro Rail station and from Central and Thomas Metro Rail station to 3rd Avenue and Osborn. This creates 4 large ‘triangles’ of development… residential on the west and north, healthcare on the south, retail, a new movie theater, and a lot of entertainment on the east are necessary since office space is not predicted to have much demand by 2030 – by then there should be very little need for most people to travel to an office to work. Please, let’s keep Park Central in check to make sure that it’s a very, very well-planned development!