Retail - Lighting The Beacon

Edina, Minnesota, is home to a massive—yet somehow nondescript—living relic of architectural history: the first modern mall, Victor Gruen’s 1956 Southdale Center. Innovative at the time, the mall is inward facing, with stores contributing to a new kind of communal plaza. But today, at the Galleria Edina, another mall just across the street, a new Design Within Reach (DWR) store aims to break away from this inward-focused architecture.

- Zachary Edelson

New York–based firm DFA has designed 23 DWR stores across North America, developing some of the retailer’s signature elements: enormous “light clouds” that showcase pendants, and “houses,” or clusters of rooms, that suggest how DWR pieces could come together in a home. But for the new store in Edina, DFA’s main objective was to enable the space to lure customers and shine, in spite of its location on the mall’s lower level.