Latin Culture Plays Role in Mall Design Workers haven’t even finished construction at Plaza del Valle, but already the repainting has begun. One color, a mustard yellow, is off, and crews have been dispatched to fix it. With one shopping center looking pretty much the same as the next, you might wonder what the big deal is over a shade of yellow. But getting the color exactly right is at the heart of this Panorama City redevelopment project. Plaza del Valle, a 190,000-square-foot shopping center set to open in December at Van Nuys Boulevard and Chase Street, is at the cutting edge of a new trend in regional shopping centers. Rather than just a place to shop, developers want these centers to become part of everyday life. While tenants remain important, they are taking a back seat to the center’s design as the key to success. “You don’t want (shoppers) to think, ‘This is where I go to buy my underwear,'” said Douglas Sutter, creative director at House of Immaculate Creation, which, along with Tapis Design, is designing the center. “We obviously want people to come and spend their money, but the most successful malls, people don’t go there for the shopping experience.” While traditional shopping centers drew customers with big-name retail stores, new malls are attracting shoppers by offering a neighborhood. As such, the right shade of yellow can make a world of difference. “These kinds of colors dominate people’s lives,” said Sutter. “Coke doesn’t use that red because they like it. It’s a very specific color that evokes an emotion.” Plaza del Valle will feature about 200 small mom-and-pop retail stores, laid out much like the outdoor markets found throughout Central and South America. About 25,000 square feet of the center will be devoted to services a doctor’s office, dental practice, accountant and a beauty school, along with some social service offices. Carey Lefton, president of Agora Realty and Management, the property managers, and a partner with Socially Responsible Investing LLC, the project developers, said he hopes the center will develop a reputation as the place to go for discount clothing and accessories, a San Fernando Valley version of Santee Alley in downtown L.A. But to do that, Plaza del Valle needs an identity that will appeal to the shoppers the developer hopes to attract. “Knowing we’re going to have small mom-and-pop type tenants who don’t have the wherewithal to market themselves, the idea is to brand the center with a look that will promote itself,” Lefton said. That idea is adding about 20 percent to the cost of designing the center. All tolled, Plaza del Valle is expected to cost about $22 million, Lefton said. Almost since shopping malls were invented, they were designed to be worlds of their own. Sealed off from neighborhoods and housing national chain stores that could be found in almost any city, they shut out crime, and change and diversity in favor of safety, predictability and homogeneity. But middle America has largely disappeared, as the most recent census data, indicating an ethnic hodgepodge across the country, is beginning to show. And instead of chasing common denominators, developers are now zeroing in on the narrowly-defined audiences more likely to make up their market. “Ozzie and Harriet are no longer the dominant shoppers,” said Michael Beyard, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research and education organization that seeks to improve the quality of land use and development. “The era of the standardized mall with the same design, the same stores, the same giant parking lot is not a response to the new consumer.” New-wave shopping centers have been rolling out slowly throughout Los Angeles for several years. Think Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Old Town Pasadena or even The Commons at Calabasas. But these earlier versions, while different in their designs, target an upscale, mostly white shopper. Plaza del Valle, in a mostly Latino community, has a decidedly ethnic twist. Lefton himself has made several trips to Mexican cities like San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato and Puerto Vallarta to shop for fountains, benches, doors and other accessories that will give Plaza del Valle its Latino flavor. But the developer and designers soon learned that the center could not simply depend for its appeal on imported Mexican culture. For one thing, many of the shoppers Plaza del Valle hopes to attract are from other areas of Central or South America, each with its own distinctive style. And any wholesale adaptation of the look of a Latin American shopping center threatened to make the center “tourist-y.” “We talked to about 280 people,” said Sutter, whose House of Immaculate Creation has designed identity programs for films such as “The Matrix” and the upcoming “Swordfish” with John Travolta. “People didn’t want to be transplanted home. They go home enough.” What shoppers said they wanted was a place that reflected their own lives and lifestyles, one where they could bring their families. The designers began their task by drawing on collections of photos, images and motifs from Latin America and then adapting them for the American market. “We wanted to give them the ‘Old World’ without becoming cliched,” said Dean Warren, co-owner of Tapis, a residential interior design firm. Large-scale tiled walkways that connect the shops along Plaza del Valle will be decorated with lizards, birds of paradise, mountains and sun and moon motifs drawn in a stylized, whimsical manner. “We hope it looks like it was painted on by an artist,” said Lary Borkin, Tapis’s other co-owner. The designers are also working on banners that can be displayed at each retail shop to promote the name of the center and the individual store.