30 | Executive Panel Profi le: Eric Kuhne, CivicArts
www.opp.org.uk | APRIL 2010
Selling the experience | Eric’s civic art approach to Cockle Bay Wharf, part of the 3.5 ha Darling Park premium offi ce development in Sydney, is a 3,000sqm garden designed in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens. Titanic Quarter (inset), a £3bn development in Belfast City built on 185 acres of shipbuilding land that launched the RMS Titanic, will be transformed into a maritime community comprising housing, business, retail, tourism, education, hotels, restaurants and other leisure uses.
WORDS | Alex Evans
The line of beauty
It’s no longer fashionable to think of consumers as fools, says city building architect Eric Kuhne, so the real estate industry needs to reinvent property for a new buyer market – blurring the lines between retail and residential
There are a very few architects who can change the psychological landscape of an
industry, but Eric Kuhne, who counts ministers and world leaders among his clients, is most likely to succeed. Specialising in city, mixed-use, resort, offi ce and retail projects, the latest addition to OPP’s Executive Panel has been creating hybridised schemes that blur the lines between leisure, residential, commercial and retail as part of a new approach to property development. “The leisure industry has the best
philosophy for all other real estate types because of its understanding of the guest experience,” he tells OPP. “This industry has only ever dealt with people for two weeks out of the year but it has been cannibalising itself due to over-building and the expectation
of continued demand. But what if you could treat the remaining 50 weeks the same, dignifying the daily routine instead of making only those two weeks special? “The leisure industry understands
that you need to sell the experience, not the property; it understands service. What if you could extend concierge level service to the routine of people’s daily lives?”
Stay at work and play
This approach was most recently applied to offi ce project Darling Park in Australia. “We moved the offi ces two fl oors up and downstairs we added a range of amenities from coff ee shops, restaurants, boutiques and markets to hotel style reception areas and even a ballroom. People still turn up with luggage expecting to be able to stay,”
he explains. “If you treat workers to resort style
amenities they want to stay longer. This idea also applies to our Bluewater shopping centre in South East England. By introducing more leisure style amenities we increased the average visiting time to 3.45 hours. The change of mindset is that property people think about the individual experience, but leisure people think about the family or social experience. When we told the client that we wanted them to spend more on a 2 million sq ft site to keep people there they thought we were crazy. But the sale per sq ft
is double that of any other shopping centre in the UK.”
Kuhne explains that this has been
achieved by designing for the family, based on his fi rm, Civic Arts’ own in- depth market research but echoed by the likes of residential tourism specialists Economics at AECOM. “The property industry has been focusing on the cash rich time poor, but we look at the opposite because they are the shopping companions who infl uence that wealthy individual,” says Kuhne. “So, at Bluewater, there’s the café for the husband as he waits for his wife to empty the cash point into her purse and shop and his teenage kids explore their own shopping experience. They’re happy to stay longer. We’ve also found that Bluewater has seen a dramatic fall in returned products because they’re not buying in haste.” This idea of the retail tourist is
gaining traction but managing the extended family as shopping companions is creating opportunities in the leisure resort industry,
This industry has only ever dealt with people for two weeks out of the year but it has been cannibalising itself due to over- building and the expectation of continued demand. But what if you could treat the remaining 50 weeks the same, dignifying the daily routine instead of making only those two weeks special?
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