North American clothing chain Urban Outfitters is about to break ground, not only on a new store but on an entire little Urban Outfitters town. People will soon be able to eat, sleep and shop without ever leaving leaving the cosy embrace of Urban Outfitters.
OK, so this is not a big town. The 6.5-acre area will have a Terrain high end garden store, an Anthropologie, a boutique hotel with 93 rooms, a luxury spa and more retail space, all built under the purview of Anthropologie’s parent company, Urban Outfitters. As you might have surmised, this is happening in a suburb, a suburb of Philadelphia to be precise, and there’s plenty of flowery commercial real estate chatter to go with it. For what it’s worth, this is not Urban’s first foray into development either. It has its own hipster mini mall in Los Angeles too.
“We’re expanding our bricks-and-mortar retail experience to a lifestyle experience that will meet the taste level of the Devon community,” Urban’s head of development Dave Ziel told the local paper. He added that the handcrafted, authentic and unique boutique hotel is the driver of this village concept.” What a “lifestyle experience” or a “handcrafted” hotel is we have no idea, but this whole build-a-town idea really seems to be catching on. Seriously, everybody’s building towns these days. [Mainline News via PSFK]
