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Westfield UTC’s $600M Overhaul Nears Completion

Construction workers were still keeping busy with landscaping and signage, as the Westfield UTC mall entered the final home stretch on a $600 million renovation and expansion.

As local Westfield Corp. officials showed off the changes during a morning media tour on Oct. 12, the new two-story Nordstrom store had just opened and was packed with visitors. Drivers had begun arriving at the mall’s new luxury-focused concierge valet-parking welcome lounge, via a palm-tree-lined driveway.

Signs throughout the property heralded new tenant arrivals still pending for October-through-early 2018 arrivals, including a Javier’s fine dining Mexican restaurant, an Arhaus Furniture store, and the first San Diego County location of the fast-growing New York-based burger chain Shake Shack.

Owner Flemming Larsen took media through his new under-construction Larsen’s Steakhouse, a 10,000-square-foot venue opening in mid-November, which Larsen said would employ up to 120 and where the restaurateur was looking to fill the UTC fine-dining-steakhouse void created when Donovan’s relocated to La Jolla Cove in 2015 after 15 years in UTC.

Larsen said the venue has already begun booking group business for its meeting spaces. This will be the first San Diego Larsen’s, after five prior openings in the Los Angeles market and one in Las Vegas.

“Our aim is to get tenants when possible who are opening their first location in the San Diego market,” said John Alderson, a San Diego vice president with Westfield.

Before the year is out, the mall will also see the arrival of the relocated San Diego office of brokerage firm CBRE Group Inc. Several more stores and dining venues will be up and running by year’s end or early 2018.

Westfield is also aiming to turn the La Jolla Village Drive center into what it was originally intended to be when it opened 40 years ago – a mixed-use development with residential units to go with the stores and restaurants.

Westfield recently broke ground on a 300-unit, 23-story luxury apartment community on another part of its UTC property , set to open in 2019. Australia-based Westfield is looking globally to turn its malls where possible into places to live as well as shop, though it’s not known whether any of its other San Diego County properties will get the residential treatment.

Officials of Westfield have said the company is evaluating its options for reviving the recently flagging Westfield Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego, where a major overhaul was announced a few years ago but has not gone forward. (Though Westfield did work with the city to develop a public square park next to that mall, which opened last year and where community events will be held.)

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