CF Shops at Don Mills is now undergoing redevelopment in two phases. The first phase (at press time this was scheduled for an October completion) includes $21 million worth of new landscaping, outdoor furniture and seating, art installations, parking reconfigurations, and sidewalk and other space expansions. The second phase, currently under way and set for completion late next year, will repurpose some retail spaces for food-and-beverage tenants.

“It was taking what we had and seeing where we could add improvements to it, both from a place-making and a functional perspective,” said Niall Collins, Cadillac Fairview’s senior vice president of development. This latest redevelopment is the culmination of eight years of analysis and observing retail traffic patterns. “There is a bike store called The Eleven, and on a given Saturday morning people were using it as a place to hang out,” said Collins. “People were using particular stores as places to meet, they wanted to buy coffee and sit around and have a chat or experience the place in a different way.”

CF Shops at Don Mills also has a built-in customer base — some 65,000 square feet of office space, including a dentist, a wealth management firm and an optician — and roughly 2,000 residential units. Today three of the planned seven condominium towers are completed, and ground will be broken this year on a fourth.

The center offers a variety of chain and independent retail tenants — Anthropologie, Bath & Body Works and Michael Kors among them. The eateries include Bier Markt, Glow Fresh Grill & Wine Bar and Jack Astor’s Bar & Grill, and the specialty and fast-food options include Panera Bread and Starbucks. More food tenants are on tap, as Collins says he seeks to boost the food-and-beverage offerings from 15 to 20 percent.

The Don Mills Centre was designed to serve the local community, but today’s CF Shops at Don Mills is drawing from a much wider trade area. “The restaurants are pulling from the other side of the city, so there are people coming from all over as well as the local community,” said Collins. “We wanted to make sure that we were giving the best experience to both groups.” A major focus was placed on access and parking, he says. “We wanted to make sure that the access points at the stacked car park were friendlier, so people could leave the car park and come into a specific location in the center,” he said. “It sounds like a minor point, but it’s a very important thing, because it makes the ability to use the center a lot easier.”

Before this renovation, Cadillac Fairview conducted a survey of customers and retailers. “The survey was more about how people experience it,” said Collins. “It was about how they were able to park, but also [about] how immersive it was as a location for why they were going there. People were going there to enjoy the space, because we live in a very dense urban environment. It’s very hard to come up with analytics that can rationalize that, but, again, it goes into how you manage your property to help it grow and propagate into something more successful.”

The CF Shops at Don Mills redevelopment was part of a four-year Cadillac Fairview program across all the firm’s Canadian properties. The company is hoping to use this project as a test for future developments.

Defining success will take some time, Collins says. “It’s going to take an annual cycle,” he said. “Next year we’ll have a good idea of how those improvements have hit the targets that we were trying to achieve.”