Green Retail

Manhattan-based GreenbergFarrow Architects recently completed the 346,000-square-foot IKEA in Red Hook, Brooklyn; it’s the tenth such store that the firm has designed. Lost in the hoopla surrounding the Swedish giant’s first New York City retail outlet is that the Red Hook iteration is applying for a LEED Silver rating predicated on a number of green design elements. The Red Hook IKEA sits on the site of a former brownfield and demolition of existing, Civil War-era buildings required significant asbestos abatement efforts. However, perhaps the most exciting green design features are those that most folks will never get to see.

As Racked reports that American Apparel is close to opening its twentieth store in New York City, we’ll note that the retailer’s Hell’s Kitchen outlet is currently in pursuit of an unspecified level of LEED for Commercial Interiors certification. The store at 610 9th Avenue will soon by joined by other iterations at 429 Broadway (Broadway and Howard) and 2103 Broadway (at 73rd Street). No word on whether the retailer’s 19 other New York City area outlets will also implement sustainable features or pursue a LEED rating. American Apparel was founded in 1997 and is based in Los Angeles. The company has implemented a number of sustainable initiatives at the corporate level.

Josh Dorfman and our friends at Vivavi have teamed with The Sheldrake Organization to open an Eco Pop-Up Store at the developer’s Riverhouse condo in Battery Park City. As you’ll recall, the project is aiming for a LEED Platinum rating and recently earned significant green press after Leonardo Di Caprio purchased an apartment in the 32-story, 264-unit tower. The store, which is a fully-furnished Unit 8D, adjacent to the Riverhouse sales center, is open to the public 7 days a week, and features pieces from 18 different green-minded designers, including Brave Space, Modern Bamboo, and Animavi, as well as a Team 7 dining room and office furnishings from Knu Furniture. Vivavi is calling the Pop-Up Store the first of its kind within a residential building in New York City, and it’s certainly the first to exclusively feature green living products.

LCOR’s LEED Gold (for Core and Shell) hopeful 545 Madison Avenue is back in the news after the developer recently inked British retailer Alfred Dunhill to a 10-year, 7000-square-foot lease for two floors of retail space. The upscale men’s clothier is currently located at 711 Fifth Avenue but will receive 175 feet of street window frontage along Madison Avenue and East 55th Street. CB Richard Ellis represented LCOR and Alfred Dunhill in the lease negotiations, which resulted in a deal at $600 per square foot. The store should open up this summer; LCOR is aiming the 17-story project’s 140,000 square feet of office space at seventeen (or fewer) boutique legal or financial services firms.

On Tuesday, the Green Building Initiative honored Earth Day by awarding its first Green Globes rating to a project in the Garden State. The Point at Morristown is a six-story, 24,000-square-foot mixed-use office and retail tower developed by Needle Point Homes, a Central New Jersey-based builder of custom home projects. According to Steve Needle, the firm chose Green Globes “because of its ability to assist us in meeting our goals to reduce our impact on the environment and the surrounding community, while being user-friendly and affordable.”