-By Gareth Fenley

When Elizabeth M. Cheng, president of the Manila, Philippines-based grocery chain Landmark, planned a store at a new mall at the terminus of Manila's main rapid transit line in Quezon City, she looked to Progressive Grocer's hometown of New York for inspiration.

Cheng wanted a world-class food retail level for the location, one of five levels of a building rising above a transit authority maintenance facility, which would be the anchor of the mall.
The station at TrinoMa (a portmanteau word coined from the phrase "triangle north of Manila") handles 80,000 commuters per day. Two adjacent major roadways are heavily plied by public utility vehicles, and the densely populated area surrounding the station includes dozens of exclusive upper- and middle-class subdivisions.

Cheng anticipated all of these sources of potential customer traffic would deliver a high percentage of family-sized groups of shoppers. "Filipino families love to do things together," says Brigitte Chan, Landmark's v.p. of finance. "They try to find activities and locations to go to, whereby they can bond with each other."

While reviewing architectural books, Cheng spotted a market designed for New York's Grand Central Station, by Hugh A. Boyd, FAIA, who practices from a small office in Montclair, N.J. She hired Boyd to come up with a fun, spacious store concept that would visually entertain, while at the same time accommodating a huge volume of shoppers.

Worlds apart

Grocery shopping customs in Asia are different from what's commonly found in the West. Asians shop more frequently -- often as a family -- and have more choices than shoppers in countries limited to chain stores do.

To differentiate the new store, Cheng wanted it to look "sleekly modern," a 180-degree change from its rustic counterparts. "They have hundreds of basic, raw markets where people are shopping every day," says Boyd. "For a supermarket to distinguish itself, they want to go to the other extreme. They want to go to the new hygiene, the cleanliness, the refrigeration."

Bigger is better

Electricity costs in the Philippines are among the highest in the world, and many citizens there don't have refrigerators at home. Because of this, they typically shop for meat and produce several times a week, and in the Philippines and throughout Asia, major department stores include grocery stores and adjoining food courts on the lowest level to drive traffic.
Cheng and her leadership team wanted the new supermarket and food court to be exciting, easy to shop, and big -- very big compared with others in the region. The 94,000-square-foot supermarket would carry upwards of 30,000 SKUs, and have a 51,000-square-foot food court.

Boyd sized up prospects by touring the downtown Landmark store and its competitors in metro Manila. "I felt all departments could be increased in size," he says.

While there was plenty of floor space available for Boyd to work with at TrinoMa, an existing structure posed a challenge. The concrete footprint of the building shell had already been constructed several years before and was never finished. What's more, the floor plate was interrupted at regular intervals by a disruptive grid of square five-foot-by-five-foot concrete columns. Ceiling heights averaged only 11 feet due to the massive structure supporting six levels above -- four retail floors for the Landmark, topped by two floors for offices and employee facilities.

In addition, Boyd was severely limited in the use of wood as a material, which he felt would humanize the concrete cavern.

"Due to heavy deforestation in the Philippines over the last 50 years, the use of wood is highly restricted and extremely expensive," he explains. "Our response to this challenge was to base the majority of the design upon inexpensive painted gypsum board, fiberglass-reinforced gypsum shapes, and a locally produced solid-surface acrylic material similar to Corian."

The low cost of these materials, along with the low cost of local labor, allowed the designers to stay within budget. Customers can access the supermarket and food court from three direct street-level entrances, elevators from the adjacent parking building and the department store, and mall-level access via the inner lobby of the department store. Curves dominate the most prominent interior surfaces. Near two entrances, oval pods conceal storage for 900 shopping carts.

To help create a sense of spaciousness, a series of light-colored, floating, rounded shapes is suspended below the exposed ceiling structure, which is painted in dark colors.

Landmark's supermarket shoppers enter into the produce section, where Boyd's team created what he refers to as a "blow-away presentation," with curving surfaces playing against the fresh fruit and vegetable shapes. Large columns faced in glass tile are wrapped by circular displays of produce.

Major specialty departments, with the exception of the wine department, are located along the perimeter, facilitating easy access to their prep rooms, coolers, and loading dock. The wines are displayed in a jewel-like, glass-enclosed island.

Abutting the supermarket is the large food court (the "Food Center") with 34 vendors, from megachains like McDonald's to local Filipino businesses. The food court has a seating capacity of 1,300. Here, the department store dictated the corner location of the escalators that connect up to the shopping floors above and the mall beyond.

Early in the construction of the department store, a series of structural columns in the food court area had to be reinforced with large, low-hanging armatures. This made the subterranean area even more challenging.

Sexy curves

"Most food courts in the States are usually built at grade where it's one big, wide-open hall, with very few columns," says Boyd. "But here, we're in a basement -- there's no natural light. Huge, massive columns are breaking up the view lines. So we wrapped the columns with beautiful, decorative, bowl-shaped objects. Once we set that up, it created a curve to take off the edges of the columns, and that started to dictate that all the counters and railings and seating areas would start playing on these serpentine curves and oval shapes."

Railings that separate seating from circulation are constructed from one-inch-thick solid-surface acrylic with oval cutouts that were hand-routed in the field.

Graphic design for the project was executed by Leslie Evans of Leslie Evans Design of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Susan Roberts of Athens, Ga. joined the team to work on the architectural color palette and murals for the food court's bowl shapes and walls. The mural designs were hand-painted by the store chain's advertising artists, from detailed maquettes by Roberts. These decorative tropical patterns wrap around the 12-foot-high bowl shapes to bring color and light to the basement location.

Mural imagery interprets local flowers, mangos, nuts, pineapples, and palms. Energy-efficient lighting systems were mandatory, due to local electric costs. The team, led by lighting designer Al Borden of Philadelphia-based The Lighting Practice, followed the strategy of brightly lighting vertical surfaces and critical displays using metal halide and fluorescent sources. General foot-candle brightness was kept contrastingly low, allowing specialty departments in the supermarket and vendors in the food court to shine.

The design team created a cohesive color environment for the project, with specifications for columns, soffits, glass tiles, grout, counters, checkout systems, chairs, signage, uniforms, and shopping baskets. Even multinational giants with locations in the food court follow the aesthetic scheme. "In Asia you can dictate more how things look," notes Boyd. "There's a very small window allowing each vendor to do its own individual design work. The result is more consistency, and an incredibly powerful design."

Very powerful, indeed: The Landmark TrinoMa was recently chosen Store of the Year by the Hollywood, Fla.-based Association for Retail Environments, and first place in the Supermarket/Grocery category by the Institute of Store Planners/VM+SD International Store Design Competition.

Gareth Fenley is a contributing editor for Display and Design Ideas, a sister publication of Progressive Grocer.