Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
It didn't look like much from the outside, but then it used to be a Dillard's.
But inside? Wow!
What was an anchor of the Winter Park Mall, 10 minutes north of downtown Orlando, is now a place to live, work or both. The Lofts of Winter Park Village is a strange combo of things: an artsy loft-like experience in a non-urban setting. A residential building that has its own curator and interesting art displayed everywhere inside, it is actually part of an open-air mall with commercial space on its ground floor. You can live right above the Cheesecake Factory.
It was the usual story with the Winter Park Mall; it got old. It was too small. Other malls opened that were glitzier. So it died. The mall was knocked down except Dillard's and in its place the new type of "lifestyle" mall was built.
Instead of all retail in one building, there are many buildings, some with one store - like Borders, others with a cluster of businesses. The Marble Slab ice cream parlor and Barnie's Coffee and Tea are just steps from the 20-screen Regal Cinema. The 10 restaurants are mostly chains, from the high-end Ruth's Chris to P.F. Chang and Taqueria Quetzalcoatl. World Publishing is strategically located next door to Blackfin, an expensive seafood restaurant and bar. An Albertson's, along with Pier One, Ann Taylor Loft, Metropolis and others, means you wouldn't have to leave the neighborhood for much.
Each cluster has wide sidewalks, and many of the restaurants have outdoor tables. So it's kind of a hybrid of downtown and mall - walkable, yes, urban, no.
But back to the Lofts, which are advertised as "Big Apple Living in Orange County."
The spare, industrial cement lobby is as hip looking as any art gallery; well, more hip looking actually.
The two floors upstairs have wide halls, art hung all the way throughout. The art changes every three months or so, and the openings are catered by Blackfin, whose owner also built the Lofts.
And it's really good art.
Commercial and residential space is mixed in together. We walked in an open door and met up with a young, shaved-headed Web designer in one of the interior lofts. Outside the elevator, a young woman in running shorts told us she had been to her trainer in the building's fitness center.
Think how unwieldy department store space is as a home or office. There are windows only on the outside of the building. To make the space livable, skylights run down the center of the roof, lighting the interior spaces that have no windows. These spaces also have inside "backyards" with low walls but virtually open to the neighbors. It's weird to look down the inside "alley" and see in these backyards an art studio or a bike stashed away.
The residential space is very cool. The units have 16-foot concrete-beamed ceilings and a built-up "loft" to use as a bedroom or whatever (the Web master had his desk there) with storage underneath, just like it was done in the industrial spaces where lofts were born. Unlike those artists' lofts, these have cool contemporary kitchens and baths.
We're all looking for new ways to live. The suburbs are okay to raise kids, but the rest of our lives - before and after the kids - we want something else. We want to get out of the house, and we want a walkable environment and places to go. If we're lucky enough to have a real downtown - one that has residential and retail and services, either because it's always been that way or has been redeveloped - that's the place to go.
But if there is no downtown, well, this isn't bad.
A place like Winter Park Village or Tampa's West Park Village doesn't feel ersatz to the generation that grew up at the mall.
It feels like home.
- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.