LAGUNA HILLS, CA—As GlobeSt.com reported recently, Nadel has completed the $17-million expansion of the Village at Nellie Gail Ranch, a shopping center located at the intersection of Moulton Pkwy. and La Paz Rd. here. The extensive remodel and expansion project incorporated 28,000 additional square feet of retail space. We spoke with Greg Lyon, principal and design director for Nadel, about how architect and design firms are approaching shopping-center repositioning and how bricks-and-mortar stores have made peace with online shopping.

GlobeSt.com: It seems that repositioning is making up a huge percentage of shopping-center development. How are architecture and planning firms like yours approaching these projects?

Lyon: Nadel survived because of clients repositioning assets. Fortunately, we are also seeing a swell of more ground-up projects happening because of all the retail space that was absorbed by food and athletic concepts during the recession. At first, we said redevelopment was simply a reimaging job, but we soon realized it was more of a real estate challenge than a design challenge. There were three main categories of redevelopment: 1. some clients had a big box that was empty and were trying to divide it up if they couldn't get a single tenant; 2. some clients had empty shop space within a center; and 3. others had underperforming assets. They all wanted to do everything as economically as possible. With the big box, it was like a jigsaw puzzle that we could reduce to reasonable-sized shop space. For empty shop space within a center, the strategy was to come up with a creative concept that the brokers could take to market and the tenants could wrap their brains around, like a Kid Zone where the tenants were all kid or family focused. That districting created a story that would allow brokers to go to market and sell something with a critical mass of visitation. The third issue of underperforming assets was more expensive and challenging—it might be a 30-year-old center across the street from brand-new one that had to be aggressively repositioned for a lifestyle feel. It's an expensive endeavor, and we're still following that now.