Discount Retailers Coming to Brentwood

Developer Robert Champion is bringing a different breed of retailer to the posh enclave of Brentwood: Sav-On Drugs and Ross Dress for Less.

These discount tenants will be the anchors of a new four-level, 70,000-square-foot retail center Champion plans to build at Wilshire Boulevard and Brockton Avenue. The $18-million Brentwood Place is scheduled to open in early 1999.

Brentwood has typically shunned such large-scale retail development, and many residents were, and still are, opposed to the discount stores moving in.

“It was a problem for some people,” said Jackie Raymond, president of the South Brentwood Homeowners Assn. “They wanted a more high-class kind of tenant.”

Champion, himself a resident of Brentwood, sees things differently. “For all the things Brentwood has, it lacks a lot of basic services. I have to drive outside my community to get a lot of things.”

Because the area is under the jurisdiction of the city of Los Angeles and the project conforms to zoning regulations, homeowner groups had little say over which retailers Champion brought in or the design of the project.

Still, Champion, who describes himself as a “reformed” mini-mall developer, sought to appease residents by agreeing to 36 conditions, ranging from parking and use of the alley to restrictions on truck deliveries. Parking will be tucked into three levels behind the center and the facade broken up by five designs to give the appearance of a European street scene.

The 1.5-acre site now holds a dilapidated hotel, a Mexican restaurant and several boarded-up businesses, all of which will be demolished next week. Fixtures from the hotel will be donated to the Union Rescue Mission.

Finding a way to slip large retailers into mature and upscale communities such as Brentwood is quickly becoming Champion’s niche. Last year his firm, Champion Development Group, built One Westside Place, a multilevel shopping center at Sawtelle and Olympic boulevards in Los Angeles that houses a Marshall’s and Linens ‘N Things.