After being vacant for more than a decade, the historic I. Magnin building in Pasadena has a new tenant: Erewhon. The opening of the store marks the grocer’s 10th location and demonstrates Erewhon’s growing interest in revitalizing old buildings.
“It’s definitely a cool thing to be able to revive a building and open up a flagship store,” said Tony Antoci, chief executive of Erewhon.
The certified organic retailer, which is famous for carrying unique products, including $26 hyper-oxygenated waters and $110 bottles of raw Manuka honey, is no stranger to adaptive reuse.
“That’s our bread and butter,” Yuval Chiprut, chief development officer at Erewhon, said. “Tony and I geek out on real estate and we love old buildings. And we like to repurpose things that people don’t really know what to do with.”
Erewhon and Long Beach-based architecture firm and longtime design collaborator RDC work together to reimagine spaces to fit the demands of the fast-growing grocery chain.
“Kind of a unique thing about Erewhon is they will go into a space that no other grocery retailer would even think about going into,” Terry Todd, associate principal at RDC who managed the project and oversaw the design of the new Erewhon, said. “They’re a lot more flexible and willing to take on (unconventional grocery) space.”
RDC has worked on the design of the six most reccent Erewhon stores to open, including Erewhon Beverly Hills, which was formerly a Williams Sonoma, and Santa Monica Erewhon, which was a bookstore and then a camera store before the grocery chain acquired it.
Complicated past
In the case of the new Pasadena store, the building located at 475 South Lake Ave. has quite a complicated history.
It was built in 1949 to accommodate a new branch of the San Francisco-based luxury department store, I. Magnin and Co. The chain reached its peak popularity in 1967, when it had 32 stores throughout the country. However, in November 1994, bankruptcy forced…
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