The 5 Most Important Landscape Enhancements for Retail Centers

Have you taken a stroll through your shopping center lately?

Does it wow you? Or would you rather be at home in your sweatpants shopping online?

Retail center landscaping enhancements need to work harder than ever these days to attract both shoppers and tenants.

Give your place a boost with these hard-working retail landscaping ideas.

1. Lighting — It’s Not Just for Safety

We’re not talking about parking lots, walkways, or storefronts. you’ve got that covered.

How about lighting for beauty, interest, and fun? It’s a shopping center landscaping must-have.
Retail center landscape lighting and plants
Light your common areas with strings of festive lights to draw shoppers over and entice them to linger.

Strategic professional lighting can turn your plant material into shadow art, highlight your most interesting trees, and lend a luxurious look to your property that shoppers and tenants will love.

Lighting helps your shopping center become the place shoppers want to visit and tenants want to set up shop.

2. Signage Updates

Signage is a big deal at a retail center. After all, it helps people find you.
Retail center signage
You’d be surprised how often it’s neglected, with overgrown plants that obscure the letters, or ill-placed plants that are dying because they don’t have what it takes to thrive in their tough conditions.

Does yours need a boost? Try these retail center landscaping signage ideas:

  • Make signage stand out with appealing plants and flowers, but make sure plants don’t obscure the words or directional arrows.
  • Think four-season appeal. It’s easy to make signage pop with bright spring and summer flowers, but flowers fade and need replacing. Include evergreens, short ornamental grasses, and shrubs that sport stand-out foliage.
  • Don’t forget the lighting. Customers want to feel confident about where they’re headed, especially at night. Even if your sign has lighted lettering, light the landscaping around it, too, for drama and impact.

3. Add a Fire Pit for Shopping Center Landscaping Magic

A fire pit? At a retail center?

Why not? Shopping centers all around the country are doing it.

You’re open after dark, right? Imagine an intriguing flickering glow beckoning shoppers to your courtyard as the sun goes down.

Include protective metal screens to keep everybody safe. Then wait for the mesmerizing magic to convince customers to stay a while.

The longer they linger, the more they’ll shop.

4. Update with A Modern Re-do

Is your shopping center landscaping aging you? No offense. It happens to the best of us.

Plants don’t live forever. Landscapes evolve over time and get past their prime. When you’re busy, the years fly by, right?

Are there overgrown shrubs that have been hanging out for 20 years? Guarantee you they don’t look great anymore. A planting bed that was in the sun 15 years ago might be shaded by mature trees now and need more light.

Are there cracked sidewalks or sunken pavers that make your place look past its prime?

Bare patches in your aging lawn?

Pretend you’re a potential tenant or customer. Take a good, hard look at your shopping center landscaping. Does it look fresh, modern, appealing?

Shoppers and tenants are looking for up to date, contemporary surroundings that look luxurious and well-tended.
Modern shopping center landscaping
They want new stuff.

Try these ideas for retail center landscaping enhancements:

  • Go modern. Opt for a contemporary mix of perennials, flowering shrubs, and graceful ornamental grasses that lend movement to the landscape.
  • Pruning and thinning. Expert plant pruning and thinning will do wonders for aging, overgrown perennials, shrubs, and trees.
  • Mulch. Fresh beds of rich, dark mulch make a huge impact, especially against a healthy green lawn and bright beds of flowers. When’s the last time you replaced yours?

5. Attention-grabbing Flowers

Don’t underestimate the power of plants in impressing and attracting both shoppers and prospective tenants. Everybody loves flowers. Make bright blooms a key element of your shopping center landscaping.

Think bright, inviting flowers lining walkways and packing giant pots at your entrances.
Bright flowers for shopping center landscaping
Sure, annual flowers put on a great show, but they don’t work hard for you in the long haul.

More retailers these days are replacing annuals with perennials and evergreens.

Annuals aren’t the most budget-conscious commercial landscaping enhancements. You have to replace them throughout the year.

But perennials come back year after year. Plant them once, then wait for their dependable show.

Landscaping Ideas for Retail Centers: Trust North by Northwest

If you’re not offering a bright, modern, appealing place to shop or set up shop, trust us — somebody else in town is.

What’s your next move?

Once your updates are complete, we stick with you, providing expert landscape maintenance to keep your investment in wow-inspiring shape.

Worried the process will be a big hassle? It won’t be, with North by Northwest.

Commercial landscape companies who are skilled at what they do and attentive to your needs as a property manager know how to make the process go as smoothly as possible from beginning to end.

We’d love to partner with you to make your retail center enhancement projects impressive and your job hassle-free.

Are you ready for stress-free landscaping? Schedule a time to meet with one of our experts today. We’ll gather the details, create a customized plan just for you, and you can stop stressing as we improve and beautify your Austin, TX property.

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