Belfort Furniture to Get Facelift

July 17, 2015  by in Furniture Retailing, Industry   

The retailer, housed in a former shopping mall, currently features four buildings and five separate entrances. As the 100,000-square-foot complex has grown the buildings have become somewhat confusing for consumers.

Belfort Furniture has contracted with Martin Roberts Design to reimagine the existing concept.

“This will be our first chance, in 28 years now, to design a building with everything that we’ve learned using our existing space, as opposed to growing into buildings that existed around us,” said Matt Huber, executive vice president. “We always knew that when we were ready, we wanted to work with Martin. We actually talked to him back in 2007, just before the whole industry came to a near stand-still. He had some really good ideas, and we had seen some of his other projects that had involved updating facades and making the exteriors of stores more current. I was also really impressed with the project that he did at the High Point Market Showroom Building, 220 Elm, involving Pulaski and Samuel Lawrence, where he took a box and really reimagined how the space works. Today when you walk in over there, you encounter a sort of inspirational space, and a bit of a decompression zone, and that’s exactly what we were looking for.”

When the renovations and expansion are complete, Belfort Furniture will comprise one larger, and unique location, including an existing building with additional space added to the mezzanine. The physical plant will also integrate Belfort’s existing distribution center, reconfiguring it into additional retail space that will include a wine bar and café. 

The wine bar, suggested by Roberts, ties in the Huber family’s passion for its sister business, Stone Tower Estate Winery, located 20 minutes  away at the family's Loudoun County farm.

“It will have an integrated, but separate, entrance so it will have a life of its own,” Huber said. “Thanks to our existing winery project, we are already partnering with local bakers for breads, artisanal butchers and local cheese makers, and we’re already working on sandwiches and salads and local produce, and we intend to capitalize on all of those things in the café.”

Along with food and libations, the wine bar area will also be a place to serve up “fun, exciting kinds of furniture, more unique, one-of-a-kind items,” Huber said. “We will use it to bring in truckloads and containers of unusual things to make it more of an inspirational space. We’ll have booths and spaces for music, and it will be a place where people can take a pause from shopping, because that’s one thing that we’ve found that people like when they are spending a lot of time on our campus—being able to sit down with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee to sit and think and plan it all out. We expect it to be pretty cool and a draw as a gathering place, in and of itself.”

Roberts said it’s a natural move for the furniture retailer.

“We’ve always believed that putting food service inside stores is a good way to get traffic,” he said. “If you do good coffee, you’ll get morning. If you do good sandwiches, you’ll get the lunch crowd. And if you do wine, you’ll get dinner, too.”

Additionally, the revamp will involve the aforementioned warehouse conversion, new entrances, a new façade and exterior treatment, as well as rebranding. When complete, it will resemble a series of shops from the exterior.