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Retail’s “location, location, location” mantra is being rewritten for a post-e-commerce world. Facing online competition, rising occupancy costs and shifting consumer habits, leading retailers are turning their real estate into multi-purpose neighbourhoods rather than single-purpose stores. The article explores this strategic pivot through four emblematic case studies: Ingka Centres opening Meeting Places that weave shopping, offices, hotels and playgrounds in 37 countries to date, Breuninger, whose Dorotheen Quartier opened in 2017 shows how a regional department store can anchor retail, apartments and offices to rejuvenate a city, Walmart, developer of a mall acquired early 2025, aiming to fuse shopping, last-mile logistics, housing and community space into a modern neighbourhood and, finally, John Lewis Partnership, venturing into build-to-rent programmes across the UK that turns surplus car parks into homes above a Waitrose or department-store anchor.

The strategic imperative: why retailers are pivoting to mixed-use projects

Traditional brick-and-mortar retailers face mounting pressure from e-commerce, changing consumer behaviours, and the need to optimise valuable real estate assets. In response, some brands are reimagining their physical presence by developing mixed-use projects that combine retail with residential, office, hospitality, and entertainment. This pivot represents more than just diversification. It’s a strategic response to several critical market forces:

• Real estate monetisation: retailers sitting on prime real estate assets are generating multiple revenue streams from the same footprint. With the rise of e-commerce, some properties can become underutilised, generating costs. Mixed-use development allows retailers to become landlords.
• Revenue stability: by incorporating residential units, office spaces, hotels, and entertainment venues, retailers reduce their dependence on product sales alone, creating more stable and predictable income sources.
• Creating destination experiences: in an era where consumers can buy almost anything online, physical retail spaces must offer something digital cannot. Lifestyle experiences are gaining traction: mixed-use developments can transform shopping from a transactional activity into a social and cultural experience.
• Community integration: mixed-use projects allow retailers to embed themselves deeper into local communities, fostering brand loyalty and ensuring long-term relevance in consumers’ daily lives.

From blue boxes to city hubs: how Ingka’s Meeting Places are re-imagining urban life

Ingka Centres, the real estate arm of IKEA, has pivoted from suburban big-box retail to their Meeting Place strategy, acquiring or building large mixed-use sites anchored by an IKEA store. Combining different functions in one place, these projects want to raise the bar regarding integrated living, working, and leisure experiences and provide an example of how these integral features of modern life can coexist. In 2025, 37 Meeting Places are already open globally, from Poland to China, from Portugal to Sweden. While they are adapting to local specificities, they are either called Avion, Livat or Lykli. Most of them bear a stylised yellow Smiley face, reminiscent of IKEA’s yellow.

One of the most significant examples is the €1 billion Livat complex in Shanghai, China. Opened in September 2024, it delivers a 430,000 square metres programme comprising a multi-functional mix of shopping, dining, entertainment, culture, wellness, children’s activities, and outdoor leisure spaces, aiming to create an all-ages-friendly, one-stop destination for lifestyle and social gatherings. It includes:

• A 200,000 square metres commercial space with more than 312 third-party stores, with approximately 71% being domestic.
• A 21,600 square metres IKEA store.
• Five Grade-A office towers.
• Deliberately non-retail amenities such as a tree-house playground and a Scandi Village, all designed to pull locals in for leisure as much as for shopping.
• Sustainability and community engagement are prioritised: the scheme incorporates an Innovation Hub that showcases circular living ideas and aligns with Ingka’s group-wide People and Planet Positive strategy.

South Asia’s counterpart, Lykli in Noida (in Delhi’s Sector 51 in the National Capital Region, 15 km from Delhi city centre) is scheduled for a 2028 handover. The project is set to attract 25 million visitors and will span 396,000 square metres and combine an IKEA store with 240 retail and F&B partners, two 37-storey office towers and Ingka’s first 267-room hotel. The transit-oriented site has its own two-line metro connection in addition to 4,500 parking lots.

Together, these investments show IKEA’s wider ambition: by owning and curating entire mixed-use districts it can lock in daily footfall for its core store, harvest long-term real-estate income, and run large-scale pilots—from rooftop biodiversity zones to circular-economy retail labs—that reinforce the group’s brand promise of affordable, sustainable living.

From single store to city quarter: Breuninger’s Stuttgart’s Dorotheen Quartier

Department store companies also venture in mixed-use projects in their own ways. As a company, Breuninger imagined and built Stuttgart’s Dorotheen Quartier in 2007, with the department store as its anchor. After 10 years in the making and a €200 million investment, the company opened this 62,000 sqm mixed-use project in 2017 to revive the area located between Stuttgart’s gourmet Market Hall, the historic Karlsplatz and the Breuninger store. Complementing it and consisting of three 6-storey buildings, the area offers a mix of luxury-oriented retailers (including Louis Vuitton, a Porsche dealership and a Tiffany store), restaurants, apartments, offices and a 350-slot underground parking lot. The project involved transforming a street into a retail space, known as the Karlspassage, which is now a small mall connected to the Breuninger store. Overall, the Dorotheen Quartier feels very lively and offers an alternative to Stuttgart’s high-street shopping area, the Königstrasse, which feels outdated (home to Peek & Cloppenburg and Galleria mid-range department stores).

The Dorotheen Quartier exemplifies how Breuninger leveraged a real estate project to create new sources of revenue. The thoughtfully designed mixed-use project has invigorated the area, seamlessly blending luxury shopping, dining, residential, and office spaces to create a lively urban ecosystem, showing Breuninger’s deep understanding of local consumer needs.

From dead mall to neighbourhood hub: Walmart’s Pittsburgh makeover

In February 2025, investing $34 million, Walmart acquired the 112,000 square metres Monroeville Mall in The Pittsburgh area in Pennsylvania, the first time the retailer has ever bought an operating regional mall outright. The company immediately confirmed that the ageing 1969 centre will be re-purposed as a mixed-use district layering new retail, restaurants, residential, hospitality, office space and public realm around (or in place of) the existing anchors. Walmart will also take advantage of the site’s location at the junction of major highways to create a last-mile fulfilment node as well as a community hub.

The project traces its DNA to the retailer’s 2018 Walmart Town Center pilot, which proposed filling the surplus Supercenter parking lots in Loveland store in Colorado, with third-party restaurants, gyms, urgent-care clinics and even apartments, to turn the big-box into the high-street of a walkable neighbourhood. Although the Loveland build never broke ground, the concept now serves as the programmatic blueprint for Monroeville and for future acquisitions the company is reportedly scouting in Texas and Florida. Monroeville will provide the scale test, positioning Walmart not just as the anchor tenant but as a developer of neighbourhoods that can capture retail sales, lease income and e-commerce efficiencies on the same parcel.

From checkouts to check-ins: John Lewis’ push into service-led rental homes

Few legacy retailers have committed to residential at the scale of the employee-owned John Lewis Partnership (JLP). Moving beyond department stores and groceries, the group has pledged to develop and operate 10,000 build-to-rent homes within a decade and has seeded the programme with a £500 million joint venture with asset-manager abrdn. JLP’s ambition is to put excellent service at the core of the UK’s private rental homes sector, with residents treated as customers, not just tenants. The scheme involves:

• Sites and scale: under-used plots such as supermarket car parks and surplus store land will be redeveloped into mixed-use complexes containing apartments and a refurbished or replacement Waitrose or John Lewis unit.
• Homes on offer: one-, two- and three-bedroom flats will come fully furnished with John Lewis products and be supported by 24/7 on-site staff. Planned amenities include shared workspaces, fitness areas and social spaces.
• Management model: rather than selling the homes, JLP will retain ownership and manage them itself, aiming to offer longer leases and a service-led experience more typical of hotels than of traditional private rentals.

This new venture will add a new income stream to bolster its core retail business and make better use of its property portfolio, much of which sits in densely populated areas with good transport links. Converting brownfield sites into housing aligns with the company’s goal of reducing urban sprawl while utilising existing infrastructure.

Entering housing is part of a wider plan to build complementary businesses. If successful, the build-to-rent arm would give the company a foothold in a growing sector while providing a hedge against the volatility of retail income. By recycling underutilised parking lots and back-of-house land into long-hold rental assets, without losing the grocery anchors that guarantee daily footfall, John Lewis is demonstrating how a department-store landlord can turn its real estate footprint into a diversified, inflation-linked income stream while deepening community presence.

Whether they sell flat-packs, fashion or groceries, each of the retailers profiled has reached the same conclusion: single-use retail boxes underperform in an omnichannel era, whereas mixed-use districts can unlock new income streams. The transition from pure retail to mixed-use development represents a fundamental evolution in how retailers can create value. Ingka, Breuninger, Walmart, and John Lewis all start with a strong anchor (an IKEA, a flagship store, a supermarket) and then layer complementary uses, including housing, offices, hospitality, and entertainment, on land they already own. The shared outcomes can be significant with diversified revenues from rents and third-party tenants, reducing the pressure on product sales. Enhancing local communities, live-work-play ecosystems give consumers more reasons to visit and stay, defending traffic against pure-play e-commerce. For retailers evaluating the same path, mixed-use development is no longer a speculative side bet but a strategic shield and a growth engine. By becoming more than merchants, retailers can monetise dormant assets, de-risk volatile sales, and secure a permanent, value-adding role in the urban fabric their customers call home.

Credits: IADS (Christine Montard)