Scentre Group is the name behind some of Australia’s biggest and best shopping centres. Their recently completed Westfield Chermside in Brisbane was named on the shortlist for this year’s World Architecture Festival.  The company is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of the traditional shopping centre experience.

For the company’s largest New Zealand project to date, they are redeveloping the 277 Broadway site along with the adjacent site, 309 Broadway, into a premium lifestyle hub. The new Westfield Newmarket will include six levels of retail between the two buildings – which will be connected by a pedestrian bridge over Mortimer Pass ­– along with a rooftop dining precinct and cinema on the top levels of the 309 site. The 277 site will also include a market-style fresh food experience offering cafés, fresh produce and much more.

Scentre Group completed the bulk of the design for this project in-house and has collaborated with other local and international companies, explains Roland Wong, design team lead. Wong has been with the company for nearly three decades. He is an architect by trade, trained in New South Wales, and has watched the evolution of shopping malls over the years, working on projects like Westfield Bondi Junction and Sydney CBD.

“If I think about shopping centres that we did 20 years ago, they were basically boxes. They didn’t engage, “ Wong says. “We now have a better understanding of what our customers want. And also, we’re a bit more respectful of the context we sit in. We create pretty big buildings and there’s a need to be more socially responsible.”

Indeed, it seems customer experience is at the heart of design for Wong. He noted that Scentre Group is vertically integrated, meaning that each of the various departments feed back to one another. Leasing, branding and, of course, customer research all get considered when creating a design. “A more holistic approach is probably the best way to describe it. We hold each other accountable in terms of what we need to deliver. We talk about it from a leasing perspective, what brands are missing and so on,” Wong explains.

The developers pride themselves on “designing for life” and not creating cookie-cutter buildings. Wong says that, when creating a building for a place like Newmarket, he “really tried to reflect on what the location is”. The cinema is planned to sit on the top level of the 309 Broadway site directly next to the motorway, and, in response to that context, the team designed a light-box type façade to create more visual interest from the outside. “We saw an opportunity to create something more vibrant, more interesting than just looking at the plain cinema box,” Wong notes.

In the same vein, the designers have collaborated with Australian firm Armada Studio to create a façade system for the new car park. “Car parks take up a lot of space,” Wong explains. “The 277 site backs up to Gillies Avenue and will just be the back of a department store and supermarket and the car park, so it’s basically a blank wall. It’s also one of the first buildings that you see as you come off the freeway. So, we worked with [Armada] to come up with quite an exciting façade design which covers the ugly parts of the building and also gives us fresh air coming in to the car park.”

Because Westfield Newmarket is such a large project in Auckland, both in scope and scale, the designers went before the Auckland Urban Design Panel for advice. Wong says that the Panel helped the design team to further build on what they considered the ‘local context’.

He notes that the Panel encouraged them to break up the large mass of the building, which has a considerable amount of street frontage. “This building is going to be quite different to some of our previous buildings where, I think, it was probably a little bit more repetitive. With this one, almost every elevation is unique. There is variation both in terms of materiality and in terms of the way we’ve broken up the facade into various components. We’ve used glass, we’ve used precast, we’ve used perforated metal and et cetera.”

The building even features 2,700 square metres of a ‘green wall façade’, which adds another component to the varied street frontage and also brings a sustainability aspect to the build. Scentre Group cites sustainability as a core value for their company, and they say their aim is to operate more efficiently and create shopping centres that “make the most of new technology and new design techniques,” according to their website.

Wong says that, though the Newmarket project is not quite large enough to try out some of their more innovative sustainability techniques, the group has a minimum accepted standard that they hold themselves to with every project. He explains that besides incorporating passive design techniques and more-sustainable materials ­– like skylights, LED light bulbs and better-than-regulated performance glass – the company also opts for high-efficiency heating and cooling systems, which consume a lot of energy in a typical project. “We also work with our building management systems so that, on a day when air quality is at a certain level, we can actually pump fresh air in to the mall,” he adds.

In terms of delivery, the team will first create a ‘prototype room’ to help them visualise how all the different interior elements will come together. “It’s for us to understand the junctions and the finishes, and also what our expectations are. We did it for the Sydney City project and found it really helpful,” says Wong. “Then, we can bring in potential subcontractors and they can see what we envision. There is less ambiguity this way. It’s great for the construction team to understand how everything works as well.”

Wong mentions that, while designing for the local context, shopping centre design must also be future focused. “We still have to be relevant when we open in a few years’ time and retail is evolving so quickly. We want to make sure we arrive at the forefront of that.”

So where is the design of shopping malls headed? “It’s an interesting question that I’ve often pondered,” Wong says. “I think, a few decades ago, the whole process of people going to the shopping centre was very transactional. They just went to buy things. It’s been evolving recently to be something more than just that. That’s why we’re working on dining being part of it. We’re thinking about giving people other experiences, whether it’s health and wellbeing, fitness or something else. It’s getting to be more of a broad mix.”

He continues, “But, something I often struggle with is how do you stop making the big even bigger? And people thinking it’s huge and they’re going to get lost and they can’t find their car. How do you make it more intuitive, more user-friendly, from a customer’s perspective? That’s probably one of our biggest challenges right now.”

Westfield Newmarket is set to open in stages beginning in 2019, with construction already well underway.