Downtown Birmingham sees surprise surge of new retailers

While some downtowns, malls and shopping centers struggle to recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on in-person shopping and office space needs, Oakland County’s downtown Birmingham is emerging as a bright spot.

The sidewalks and parking structures are busy once again with visitors and downtown workers on lunch break, and at least eight retailers and four new food establishments have in recent months opened, expanded or made plans to open in the future in the multiple-block downtown area that already has roughly 600 businesses.

Existing retailers are reporting strong rebounds in their sales numbers and demand for downtown Birmingham office space is at pre-pandemic levels or higher, according to interviews with business owners and real estate insiders.

While downtown Birmingham has long been a destination for upscale and mid-market shopping and generally weathered past recessions, this latest influx of new arrivals underscores the area’s resilience and persistent popularity.

“Downtown Birmingham provides both the approachableness and the sophistication in the customer base and as a shopping destination,” said Michael Tamte, co-founder and co-CEO of Evereve, a nationwide women’s apparel brand Tamte oversees with his wife. They expanded the Birmingham store in September.

“The tenant mix is for the most part aspirational, but it’s not pretentious,” he said. “It’s not snobby.”

Real estate insiders say that a popular retailer is looking to open a new store at Maple and Old Woodward, going into space previously occupied by Panera Bread and the shuttered Tiger Shoe Repair. A big announcement could happen soon, sources said.

Much of the momentum in downtown dates to just before the pandemic when RH, the upscale home décor retailer formerly known as Restoration Hardware, revealed plans to build a four-story building for its new store at 300-394 S. Old Woodward Ave. that could also feature a restaurant.

An RH representative wouldn’t comment last week about the company’s plans for its Somerset location or when the Birmingham store could open. Construction of the new store has yet to begin.

Retail isn’t the only hot category.

Demand for downtown Birmingham office space is more or less back to pre-pandemic levels, even as many employers give workers more options to work from home.

On the office space front, “Birmingham is the hottest it’s ever been right now,” said Daniel Canvasser, executive managing director for the Newmark commercial real estate firm.

“They have the bars, they have the restaurants, they have the nightlife, they have the people out on the street,” he said. “They have that fun atmosphere and work environment.”

Stores are seeing more weekday shoppers stop in as office workers return.

Work colleagues Deidre Bounds and Debbie DeSantis strolled through downtown on a recent afternoon during their lunch break. Their employer, Ignite Social Media, has a nearby office, and employees are starting to return to in-person work.

“It is nice to see retail is still going on and that new retailers are showing up here,” said Bounds, Ignite’s president and CEO. Prior to the pandemic, “we did do a lot of shopping (downtown). It’s very easy to pick up a birthday gift or a quick gift for somebody when you need to.”

New hotel and restaurant

Earlier this year, downtown Birmingham gained its second luxury hotel after The Townsend with the April opening of the 151-room Daxton Hotel, 298 S. Old Woodward Ave.

The hotel’s restaurant, Madam, made an instant splash on the dining scene. It is said that procuring weekend dinner reservations can still be a two- or three-week wait.

Upscale hotels across metro Detroit took a major hit with the pandemic and the collapse it caused for business and convention travel.

Daxton General Manager Aaron Black declined to share the hotel’s nightly occupancy, but said occupancy has been growing every month and exceeding COVID-19-reflected projections, although not pre-pandemic projections.

“Even though we’re not 100% certain what the impact long-term of COVID-19 will be, we remain confident that things will return to a scenario that is healthy enough to sustain,” Black said. “We are sustained at present, so hopefully it only gets better for us — and there is no reason to expect that it won’t.”

Besides RH and the potential new retailer for the old Panera space, other new or newly expanding retail stores in downtown include:

Faherty, a casual apparel brand for men, women and kids that plans to open its first Michigan store at 128 S. Old Woodward.
Evereve, a women’s apparel store with about 100 nationwide locations that recently opened an expanded store at 128 S. Old Woodward.
State & Liberty, a men’s athletic fit apparel brand based in Ann Arbor that plans to open this month at 141 W. Maple.
The Great Eros, a women’s apparel and lingerie shop that opened last month at 245 W. Maple Road, its first location outside New York City. Co-founder Christina Viviani is from metro Detroit and recently moved back. “It’s a beautiful downtown. The people are really friendly, there’s a sense of community and there’s fabulous restaurants and plenty of places to go and shop,” she said.
Circa Lighting, an upscale lighting brand that plans to open at 250 E. Merrill St.
A retail store is expected to open early next year at 277 Pierce St., although the brand has yet to make an official announcement.
Another retailer — name still to be announced — could go into the 299 W. Maple storefront that was previously occup the Linda Dresner boutique.

As for food, several new options recently opened or could open in the future:

Madam, the restaurant in the new Daxton Hotel, opened in April.
Paris Baguette, a national chain of bakery cafés that also serve sandwiches, soups and salads, plans to open a franchise location in December at 183 N. Old Woodward, the first Paris Baguette in Michigan.
RH restaurant; designs for the planned four-story RH store called for a restaurant on its top floor.
Sources say a restaurant has been eying 165 N. Old Woodward. A broker for the property declined to comment.

A handful of retailers are moving locations in downtown, or even leaving Birmingham entirely, to make way for newcomers.

Bakehouse 46, 136 N. Old Woodward, plans to leave its current location to provide more space for the yet-to-be-named retailer that might go into the old Panera. Bakehouse is staying in downtown and moving to the former Adventures in Toys space at 250 W. Maple Road.

Frank’s Shoe Service, in business since 1962 at 360 S. Old Woodward, will permanently close by the end of the month when owner Frank Konjarevich, 83, retires. The building, which Konjarevich owned and sold to RH’s developer, is to be demolished to make way for the planned RH store.

“It’s an old building, a lot of stories, a lot of history here,” Konjarevich said. “It wasn’t an easy thing to do after so many years and the wonderful customers I’ve had. A lot of mixed emotions.”

Roche Bobois, a furniture store that neighbored Frank’s, left downtown Birmingham earlier this year because its store is also in the future footprint of RH. Its building was also owned by Konjarevich and sold to RH’s developer. Roche Bobois’new location is in Novi.

Mary Ann Santerini, a manager at Roche Bobois, told the Free Press that they considered staying in Birmingham but could not find a suitable location that didn’t require significant renovation.

Deals lead to others

Sean Kammer, executive director of the Birmingham Principal Shopping District, called RH’s announcement a catalytic event for downtown that encouraged other retailers to give Birmingham a look.

The district has been working with real estate consultant Cindy Ciura of CC Consulting to help plan and market the downtown and attract new businesses.

One of the coming arrivals is State & Liberty, a men’s apparel company that launched in 2015 as an online-only retailer, but now has 17 stores in the U.S. and Canada.

“People talk about e-commerce as the future, and in a lot of ways it is,” co-founder Steven Fisher said. “But we’ve all seen through this (pandemic) how important actually seeing and touching and being able to try something on still is.”

The anticipated arrival of RH wasn’t the sole reason State & Liberty decided to open in Birmingham, he said. Rather, RH’s plans demonstrate why retailers in general like the downtown.

“We are excited about retail areas like Birmingham, where you have a concentrated area with a lot of foot traffic. People are walking around, people are shopping. And that was a perfect fit for us,” Fisher said. “At the end of the day, (RH) wanting to come to Birmingham is more of a confirmation that we chose the right place than it is us saying we’re coming because of them.”

Asking rents up

The vacancy rate for downtown Birmingham space is about 6%, although poised to drop once the latest batch of new retailers finalizes leases.

Asking rents range from about $60 per square foot (triple net) for the most highly sought retail space to about $24 per square foot for office space, and the current average is $34.74 per square foot, or about $1 more than before the pandemic, according to Kammer, the shopping district director.

While other shopping districts or malls in the region worry about too many empty storefronts, downtown Birmingham faces a different problem.

“We are running out of space right now,” Kammer said. “There are stores that will contact us … looking for commercial space, and I’ll talk to brokers and I’ll talk to Cindy (Ciura), and we have to break it to them that there’s nothing really available that fits what you want right now.

“I just got a call today from a retailer,” he added. “They actually have a brick-and-mortar (store) in downtown Detroit and wanted to do kind of a test market up here for a while, and we really didn’t have anything we could offer.”

Posted By: Detroit Free Press on November 13, 2021. For more information, please click here to read the source article.

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