The upscale shopping mall Westfield Old Orchard in north suburban Skokie will soon have hundreds of new luxury apartments, the next step in its $100 million transformation into a mixed-use neighborhood. Owner Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has enlisted residential developer Focus to build by 2027 about 400 homes with new street-level retail and expects to break ground in 2025.
Longtime shoppers may no longer recognize Westfield Old Orchard when the developers complete the work. Along with new apartments, they plan on adding a park, restaurants and many outdoor amenities.
“The housing will bring people to the site and they will be able to call it home,” said Stephen Fluhr, senior vice president of development for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, providing the renovated property with built-in customers. “Everyone has their favorite restaurant, as well as their favorite place to get a coffee or a drink, so our apartments will help create a 24/7 ecosystem.”
Westfield Old Orchard isn’t the only suburban mall getting a new look.
Developers across the metro area are transforming aging retail properties into 24-hour community hubs with hundreds of residences, largely because online shopping now keeps many buyers at home, forcing big-box retailers like Sears to shut down, said John Melaniphy, president of Melaniphy & Associates Inc. and director of economic development for the village of Niles.
“The reality is there is less demand for certain kinds of retail space,” he said. “But residences make tremendous sense because apartments are in high demand and they give new vitality to shopping malls.”
The Niles Village Board last year approved a nonbinding agreement with the Sterling Organization for a $440 million overhaul of Golf Mill Shopping Center. The developer plans to gut the interior, renovate and add retail space, and build a 300-unit luxury apartment building.
Fluhr said he likes that Chicago-based Focus has experience building hundreds of apartments at existing malls, including Hawthorn Mall in Vernon Hills and the Fox Valley shopping mall in Aurora, without disrupting customers.
“It’s like doing surgery on a patient that’s wide awake, so I was looking for a team which understood that environment,” he said.
Focus built more than 300 units at Hawthorn Mall on the former site of a Sears, and Westfield Old Orchard’s new residential community will replace Bloomingdale’s, which left its three-story, 200,000-square-foot location in 2022, later opening a new Old Orchard store called Bloomie’s. The new store occupies about one-fourth the space and only sells its most popular items.
Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is also reconstructing Old Orchard’s now-empty Lord & Taylor building into a home for smaller retailers such as home furnishings brand Arhaus, mini golf outlet Puttshack and upscale clothing store Zara.
When complete, the residences at Westfield Old Orchard will include a pool, lounge, fitness center, co-working spaces, pet spa and community spaces for concerts, farmers’ markets and other events.
“This is an opportunity to rethink what a mall can be,” Focus CEO Tim Anderson said. “It can become a mini-city.”
