design:retail - July 2015 - (Page 38)

038 shopping with paco Dubai: The Final Frontier PACO UNDERHILL CEO & FOUNDER ENVIROSELL p.underhill@envirosell.com T HE BOXED SET of "Star Wars" movies has just been released, and the set of "Harry Potter" movies is probably in the pipeline. In both cases, I thought the first film was magical and the subsequent releases were of declining interest. I have similar feelings about returning to Dubai. The audacity of Dubai is breathtaking. The Dubai of today is like a "Star Wars" set, with towers rising out of the sand, exo-skeleton buildings frozen in mid-construction and soaring airplanes on the edges of every vista. In the relative coolness of April (where daytime temperatures peak in the high 90s), there is a heat fog of sandy dust and wind. The skyline remains surreal, while the principle spine of highways is crowded with mostly white cars; you sense the absence of people. If they are there, they are hiding. Dubai sits at air transit central. Beyond oceans that defined trade routes through human civilization, it is Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, O'Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson redefined. Traveling from São Paulo to Tokyo, the logical geographic stop-off point is a spit of land at the base of the Strait of Hormuz. The global proposition of the U.A.E. also makes it a time-out place for a volatile region of the world that is convulsing with ethnic and religious strife. Across the city-state are hundreds of residential towers. Its occupants are more than 80 percent expats, a majority of homes and apartments are owned by wealthy and well-to-do families from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, India and beyond. Its tourist traffic is a cross-section of emerging market wealth from Russia, the former Soviet Republics and the Indian subcontinent. More so than Europe, it is a comfortable place, where differences in wardrobe and skin tones attract no attention. While Dubai and the U.A.E. are growing hospitals, schools, vacation destinations and museums, the JULY 2015 DESIGNRETAILONLINE.COM Since my last visit, a number of new malls have opened. The first is about scale-The Mall of Dubai is big, one of the largest malls in the world. With 65 million-plus visitors a year (more than New York City), it has 1,200 stores, an ice skating rink, aquarium and underwater zoo, and a brand spanking new Bloomingdale's, where only the men in Arab dress clue you in to the fact that you aren't on 59th Street. The mall has specialty wings. I like the concentration of shoe stores, a generation beyond the Selfridges floor, with more imaginative merchandising (men's shoes on billiard tables were my favorite). The denim wing has jeans stretched out on laundry lines over the concourse. It is easy to get lost, and many people do. The world's tallest building is connected to it, and it is part of a new downtown BoxPark, Dubai that did not exist 10 years ago. This is not a Corbusier-style masterplan. In the desert, you don't need the green space, and what greenery you start of the commercial hub has been shopping. It do have needs to be watered twice a day or it shrivels is hard to find anything else to do in Dubai. The heat in the heat. and wind can be tolerated and enjoyed by those stalThe 44-store BoxPark had its soft opening in wart dune-buggy addicts, but playing golf is tough February. It's a mall constructed out of recycled shipfor eight months of the year. The shopping is superb. ping containers. I've seen the idea before, but not at While smartphones are ubiquitous, the online hunt this scale and not in this location. In concept, it is for better pricing is absent. This is a generally affluecological and visually stunning. It also is profoundly ent customer with no apparent shortage of funds flawed-steel buildings absorb and transmit heat. and an endless appetite for luxury goods. The energy cost to cool a steel industrial building to Dubai's first shopping mall was built in 1981, retail temperatures are considerable. Its redeeming although it wasn't until the '90s that its shopping mall feature may be the permanence of its recycled maboom started, beginning with its first shopping festiterials treated to last. Another "Star Wars" set getting val in 1996. At the outset, each new property looked ready for the 62nd installment to be filmed in 2050, for a unique selling proposition. Mall of the Emirates animated by all those intergalactic tourists oblivious had a ski slope in the middle of the desert, which to the heat, but still hungry for the goods. became more of place to don parkas and sip hot chocolate than to slide on artificial snow. The Ibn Battuta PACO UNDERHILL IS THE FOUNDER OF ENVIROSELL AND AUTHOR OF Mall, named after the Islamic explorer, has wings deTHE BOOKS "WHY WE BUY" AND "WHAT WOMEN WANT." HE SHARES signed after different parts of his journeys to the edges HIS RETAIL AND CONSUMER INSIGHTS WITH DESIGN:RETAIL IN THIS of the 15th-century Islamic world-not unlike The BI-ISSUE COLUMN. Venetian in Las Vegas, but on a much bigger scale. Photo by PACO UNDERHILL http://www.DESIGNRETAILONLINE.COM

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of design:retail - July 2015

design:retail - July 2015
Contents
Editor’s Note
Show Talk
On Trend
We Love This!
Designer Picks
Clicks & Mortar
Have You Heard?
Mingle
Perspectives
Shopper Insights
Shopping with Paco
From Concept to Completion
Brothers Marketplace
Nebraska Furniture Mart
Fixture Leaders
Fixture Products
Backstory

design:retail - July 2015