Target Outside the Box

Rich Varda is Target's in-house lead architect—and he's overseeing the design of stores that don't look like standard Targets. The idea is to create stores that fit in with nonstandard Target surroundings: a downtown shopping district, say, or a warehouse-lined street.

August 2008 | by Linda Mack

Target's Rich Varda oversees the design of "nonstandard" stores—drawn up to fit into individual urban surroundings.

Photo by Joe Treleven

You know what a Target store looks like—a standalone, single-story big brick box with the red bull’s-eye affixed to the exterior and a vast parking lot in front.

Or do you?

The two-story store on Minneapolis’s Nicollet Mall, with its atrium entryway, is not the only “nonstandard” Target out there:

In Glendale, California, the local Target is located on the third level of a mall, where it shares an anchor position with Nordstrom.

In Chicago’s South Loop, the Target store incorporates the dark brick exterior typical of its surroundings, a trendy warehouse neighborhood.

In hip West Hollywood, three Target bull’s-eyes on a “skewer” sit atop the second floor of a glassy, dynamic complex designed by The Jerde Partnership, a California-based retail-space specialist.

In Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal development, a Target occupies the second and third levels above street-level stores and a train stop—and there’s no adjacent parking.

“No parking, and it has the highest sales volume in the chain,” marvels architect Rich Varda, who joined Target Corporation in 2001 as vice president of architecture and engineering after a career with two of Minneapolis’s biggest firms. Last year, his title at Target became senior vice president of store design.

At the behest of former CEO and current Chairman Robert Ulrich, Varda has extended the design savvy that brands Target products and retailing to the architecture of its stores. And as the retailer continues to build within more densely populated urban sites, it is creating what it calls “unique stores”—distinctive store designs that combine both brand awareness and the company’s style-conscious “design for all” philosophy. Even the standard Targets being built are getting a new exterior look, as evidenced by snazzy new SuperTargets in Richfield and Edina.

Together, Varda and Target are rebranding big-box retail.

Branding the Look

A longtime principal with top Minneapolis firms Ellerbe Becket and RSP Architects, Varda led the design of LaSalle Plaza, the Carlson School of Management, and Target Plaza North at 10th and Nicollet Mall before joining Target. He now reviews the design of every new store or remodeling that Target does, suggesting a new cornice detail here, a better way to handle circulation there.

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Rich Varda is Target's in-house lead architect—and he's overseeing the design of stores that don't look like standard Targets. The idea is to create stores that fit in with nonstandard Target surroundings: a downtown shopping district, say, or a warehouse-lined street.

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Target Outside the Box

Rich Varda is Target's in-house lead architect—and he's overseeing the design of stores that don't look like standard Targets. The idea is to create stores that fit in with nonstandard Target surroundings: a downtown shopping district, say, or a warehouse-lined street.

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