Sporting Life open at Amazing Brentwood

Amid various delays at the Amazing Brentwood, Sporting Life quietly opened for business yesterday.  I took the opportunity to go check it out yesterday evening and to walk around the opened portion of the Entertainment Plaza connecting to the station.  Starbucks will open soon as we await other openings over the next few months.  As for Sporting Life, it's a pleasant arrival to a mall that has been lacking the presence of a big time retailer for a long while.

Retail tenants revealed for Brentwood

It has been about 2 months since my last post.  During that time, the Willingdon Linear Park has won an award while cycling advocates complain about not having a dedicated bike path along the length of the park.  If we are having discussions and debates about separating pedestrian from bicycle paths, it's a good thing as we move towards designing our city to be more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly

As the pedestrian areas in and around Brentwood's Entertainment Plaza begin to take shape with nicely lit steps, benches and beautiful greenery in the form of trees and shrubs, it appears that a full opening of Phase 1 of the Brentwood development has been delayed.  However some retail names have been revealed for the development as it inches closer to a gradual opening that will unfold between this fall and 2020.  According to the Daily Hive article below, the Cactus Club and McDonald's, will join Starbucks in the Entertainment Plaza.  H&M, Wilfred, Nike and Adidas have joined Sporting Life among the retailers announced.  More retail names should be revealed beginning this fall.

First look inside: The Amazing Brentwood shopping mall will live up to its name (PHOTOS)

Kenneth Chan

|

Jul 26 2019, 9:59 am

It is safe to say The Amazing Brentwood (TAB) will live up to its name.

The first phase of the expansive redevelopment of what was previously known as Brentwood Town Centre shopping mall is now racing towards completion, with project team crews now well into the process of incrementally handing over completed shell commercial spaces to the construction contractors hired by the many retailers.

Darren Kwiatkowski, the executive vice-president of acquisitions and development for Shape Properties, provided Daily Hive this week with an exclusive first glimpse of the project nearing its final stage.

“We’re really excited that after many years of planning, design, and construction, we are close to being finished,” said Kwiatkowski.

“This place is coming alive… We think the public will be very excited and really embrace the project, and we’re looking forward to many years of success here.”

To say the least, it is certainly a highly impressive application and scale of a mixed-use, transit-oriented redevelopment concept; much attention to detail has been provided to this $1.5-billion phase of the new indoor and outdoor shopping mall with a wide range of retail and dining, residential and office spaces, and an immersive public realm.

The new shopping mall’s selection of retail, restaurants, and entertainment, with a greater-than-normal emphasis on the latter two, is intended to bring people to TAB. It speaks to how the next generation of malls in the rising retail age of e-commerce are increasingly focusing on creating experiential activations that supplement traditional retail.

To achieve an optimal mix of global luxury, mid-market, and local-serving retail, the developer partnered with global firm L Catterton Real Estate to turn TAB into a mall with high-calibre architecture, public art, and world-renowned and luxury retail brands.

CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE WITH PHOTOS

Sporting Life coming to Brentwood

With 12 stores currently in Canada, Sporting Life's first BC store will be coming to the Amazing Brentwood in 2019.  Sporting Life is scheduled to open in the Fall of 2019.  Shape properties will begin to reveal it's lineup of new stores as we approach the 2019 opening of the Amazing Brentwood. 

(Retail Insider article below)

Sporting Life Announces 1st Store Location in British Columbia

July 29, 2018

By Craig Patterson

Upscale Toronto-based sport and fashion retailer Sporting Life is expanding into new markets. The company has just announced that its first store in British Columbia will open in the fall of 2019 at The Amazing Brentwood in Burnaby, east of Vancouver. It’s all part of an expansion to position Sporting Life as a national brand that will soon have stores in four provinces. 

“Vancouver’s renowned active and health conscious population provides an ideal foundation for launching Sporting Life on the West coast,” said Sporting Life co-founder and CEO David Russell. “We’ve had our eye on this city since Patti (co-founder of Sporting Life) and I lived in Vancouver years back. We see the value in this market and believe in the retail environment. We hope to ultimately have three stores in the greater Vancouver area.”

The Brentwood Sporting Life store will span about 44,000 square feet according to the company, and will open in 2019. The store will feature attractive interiors and an assortment of designer brands, as with the company’s other stores. 

Last summer, The Amazing Brentwood’s landlord SHAPE  announced that it had partnered with the L Catterton group, which is a private equity firm linked with French luxury conglomerate LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) and Groupe Arnault. The new $2 billion The Amazing Brentwood will become the focal point of a community that will include over a million square feet of retail space, considerable office space, as well as multiple residential towers for thousands of new residents. The first phase is scheduled to open in the spring of 2019. 

The Amazing Brentwood’s retail component will house more than 250 stores, a ‘culinary collection’, and a one-acre plaza. An entertainment focus will also include the addition of Cineplex VIP Cinemas, as well as The Rec Room entertainment centre. Brentwood is eyeing luxury brands to move into the centre, placing it directly in competition with QuadReal’s Oakridge Centre on Vancouver’s West Side, which intends on becoming the region’s second ‘luxury node’ to complement the downtown Vancouver ‘Luxury Zone’.  

Sporting Life was founded in 1979 and sells apparel and footwear, as well as equipment geared towards runners, cyclists, skiers, snowboarders and hikers. It has a large selection of outerwear, fleece and coats from popular brands Moncler, Canada Goose, Arc'teryx and The North Face, among others. It also carries a mix of high-end and casual clothing brands such as Barbour, Bogner, Hugo Boss, Mackage, John Varvatos and others. Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. bought 75% of Sporting Life in December of 2011.

FULL ARTICLE CONTINUES here