Westfield Knox breaks new ground with $355m facelift
Listed shopping centre behemoth Scentre is breaking new ground in Melbourne’s east, unveiling plans to add a 25-metre swimming pool to its $355 million revamp of Westfield Knox.
Scentre is rolling out a suite of new community focused uses for the centre, including a 2000 square metre library, in a bid to attract and keep more customers on the floor.
Parts of the new lifestyle-focused centre have been tried in New South Wales, where Westfield Mt Druitt is getting a new $55 million lifestyle precinct, but Scentre is going all in at Knox.
Scentre Group director of development Stewart White said, “It’s a first for us in Victoria, but it’s a groundbreaking development for us, and we’ll be seeing how we can adapt it to other places and markets.”
The recent departure of Myer, which had been the centre’s department store mainstay since it opened in 1977, kicked off a reimagining of what a shopping centre could be.
“We’ve stripped out the old Myer box and repositioned the space for retail and lifestyle,” White said.
“We’re only adding 3000 sq m of space. We are retaining and repurposing the space rather than demolishing and rebuilding,” he said.
Other sustainability measures include rain water harvesting, solar panels, food composting and an onsite glass-crushing system.
Stage one, a new fresh food market on level 1, is due to open by the end of the year. Stage two, rolling out next year, includes the Aquatic Achievers swim school, a new food court, basketball courts and a library.
Scentre set up focus groups and information booths in the 140,000 sq m centre to find out what the local community wanted from the shopping centre.
There are 474,000 people in the centre’s immediate catchment area, with a further 2.2 million people are estimated to have access to the centre.
The surveys yielded three main points from locals: living and working close to nature, community culture, and living and working in the local area.
To accommodate their interests, the revamped northern section will boast views out to the Dandenong and Lysterfield ranges and include more timber, plants and trees inside and outside the centre. The adjacent council-owned Lewis Park is also poised for a revamp.
When Scentre was spun off from Westfield in 2014, just 10 per cent of stores were devoted to experience-based retailers – mostly restaurants and cinemas. Experience-based retailing now makes up 43 per cent of the total 12,000 stores.
And while other centres are making a beeline for luxury, that’s not on the cards for Westfield Knox.
“It all comes down to the market. People can go to the city for luxury shopping. We’re not aiming for that,” White said.
It’s not traditional retailing but the new community-based features, such the basketball courts, the library and the swim school, are expected to pull in more shoppers.
“It will have a spin-off effect on the number of people coming into the centre,” he said.
