Plans for downtown furniture malls are changed

Jeffrey Libby

Thursday, Nov. 16, 2000 | 11:17 a.m.

Furniture Mart of America has lopped four stories and a degree of glamour from its two 700,000-square-foot retail furniture malls planned for downtown Las Vegas.

But the furniture group stressed this morning that it has not scaled back the project. Only the buildings' designs have changed.

"The original building was going to be a seven-story Class A building with high ceilings and stained glass, a huge beautiful foyer," Nelson Tressler, a local retail adviser with Grubb & Ellis Property Solutions Worldwide, said. "Now it's been scaled down to a three-story building, with around 217,000 square feet per floor and it's more of a plain building."

The two planned retail malls will go hand-in-hand with what is being billed as the West Coast's largest wholesale furniture showroom planned for a nearby 56-acre site in the downtown. That project will have 1 million square feet of floor space.

The retail and wholesale projects, first announced in September, have been coupled with other recent planned developments and hailed by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman as evidence that a revitalized downtown could be in the making.

Goodman has said he would support the project as much as was "humanly possible." But the wholesale building would have to meet the architectural standard set by the county government building, he said.

Whether the retail mall will be held to the same "Triple-A standards" was not apparent this morning. The mayor, who was in a special City Council session, could not be reached for comment.

Greg Borgel, a Las Vegas planning consultant, said this morning that he had successfully guided the retail buildings through the city of Las Vegas planning department. But he was not aware of the decision to scale back the buildings, he said.

The more modest three-story buildings will allow Furniture Mart to reduce rents from $2 per square-foot to $1.25 per square foot, Tressler said.

Architects redrafted plans after potential tenants expressed concern at the high rents, Tressler said.

Furniture Mart has received tentative agreements with 40 retailers interested in renting about 250,000 square feet of floor space.

The majority of retailers are American, but several companies from India, Italy and Japan have also expressed interest.

Jack Karshani, a manager for Furniture Mart, said the home furnishings retail malls will attract a large West Coast market.

Nelson echoed that sentiment.

"(The first building) is going to be a Jeep instead of a Mercedes, but it will still get you where you're going."