The Westside Pavilion—the iconic 1980s-era mall that has appeared in Clueless and the music video for “Free Fallin’”—will be converted into a hub of creative office space.
Hudson Pacific Properties announced today that it has acquired majority ownership of the mall from Macerich and will turn 500,000 square feet of the shopping center into “state-of-the-art creative office space.” About 100,000 square feet will remain as “entertainment retail space” with a movie theater, a restaurant, and some shops.
Hudson Pacific CEO Victor Coleman called the Pavilion “a marquee asset in a premier location,” adding that the new iteration of the mall “is poised to capture the strong demand from tenants for creative office space on the west side of Los Angeles.”
Hudson Pacific will act as the day-to-day operator and developer of this next phase of the Westside Pavilion, which has faced flagging occupancy rates—a phenomenon not unfamiliar to indoor malls across the country.
The retail center lost one of its largest tenants, Nordstrom, late last year when the department store moved to the recently refreshed Westfield Century City. The Macy’s in the Pavilion is expected to close this year.
Macerich had kicked around the idea of renovating the mall and making it more open, but that plan never got off the ground. In November, Macerich put the property up for sale.
“West L.A. has too many malls chasing the same customer and it was due for consolidation,” Macerich CEO Art Coppola told the Wall Street Journal in October.
The Rancho Park mall is located close to the Westwood/Rancho Park Expo Line station and near the 405 and 10 freeways.
Completed in 1985, it has appeared in movies and TV from Clueless to This Is Us. Designed by the firm of Jon Jerde, whose firm also designed the 1984 Olympics, the mall “is a strong expression of Jerde’s goals for mall architecture as populist architecture,” says the Los Angeles Conservancy. Jerde also designed the Mall of America in Minnesota.
A timeline for the office space conversion project has not been announced.
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