Driving west on Dodge Street from downtown Omaha, Neb., skyscrapers give way to the rolling green turf of Memorial Park and a neighborhood of genteel but slightly worn early 20th century houses (any local will point out the one where Warren Buffett lives). Around the intersection with 70th Street, still inside the city limits, the sprawl starts in earnest, with rank upon rank of strip malls. You keep driving, then hang a right on 120th Street. And then, at Blondo Street, you do a double take.

Because what is that? A metal trapezoid, its base hovering several feet above the ground, juts up two stories—a compelling sight in the low-rise land of American retail. The floating form slices into a brown-gray stuccoed box. Down at ground level, a regular line of recessed doorways, each one crowned by a backlit, white polycarbonate sign with understated lettering, unlocks the mystery: This is a strip mall, too—a strip mall designed by Randy Brown.

When Brown, 41, completed the first phase of this office-retail strip back in 1998, “I didn't anticipate it having such shock value. It was on the radio,” he remembers. (The Omaha World-Herald ran the headline, “Architect Plays the Angles in ‘Weird' Office Building.”) He built the initial phase to house his father's law firm, Brown & Wolff (his own architectural practice, Randy Brown Architects, subsequently moved in, along with other tenants). The project's second phase, the retail component, opened in 2003. Omaha has warmed to the “weird” structure, apparently: 120 Blondo is fully leased by tenants including a coffee shop, a carry-out, and a salon.

The winner of seven national AIA Honor Awards-including those for a meat-packing plant and Omaha's Better Business Bureau-Randy Brown has set his sights on the retail strip as an architectural, and financial, opportunity. Backed by his own development company, Quantum Quality Real Estate, Brown has completed three strip malls, with another under construction and a fifth on the boards. "Strip malls are not going to go away," he says. "So how do we make [them] a better experience?"

Credit: Randy Brown Architects

120 Blondo is listed in The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture, a first for Brown and for the state of Nebraska. But the retail phase was another kind of watershed for the architect: It was the first undertaking of his real estate development and management company, Quantum Quality Real Estate.

Quantum was formed in 2001 by Brown; his father, lawyer Paul Brown; brother Scott Brown, also a lawyer; and brother-in-law Rob Luellen, a real estate broker. “I was frustrated with the current developers I was trying to market,” the architect Brown says. “And what the developers were doing, I didn't think was very good. My brother's a lawyer, my father's a lawyer, my brother-in-law's a real estate agent. We got together and said, ‘Let's pool our resources.'”

Although the partners come from different professional backgrounds, what all their professions share, Brown points out, is a dependence on clients and client-driven work, which can be precarious in bad times. “But developers who own buildings are getting rent every month,” he says. “The common denominator was that we thought owning property as an investment made long-term business sense.”

Backed by the combined expertise and capital of Quantum, Brown has pushed his vision of high-design strip shopping into more locations around Omaha, continually refining it with an eye on tenants' needs and on Quantum's bottom line. The nuances of this balancing act are in evidence at his second strip-mall project, Village Pointe East, which opened in 2005.

The L-shaped mall, built into a slope, takes advantage of the terrain to maximize square footage—and Quantum's rental income—with a lower-level “walk-out basement” used by a daycare center. Among the other tenants are a doctor's office, a salon, a Subway, a Hertz, and, directly above the daycare center, a martini bar. “Day care with a bar above—that is what I call mixed use!” jokes Brown. But the arrangement “worked out well, because there are totally different times that [the businesses] operate,” he adds.

How important is the architecture? “To tenants, it's all about location, signage visibility, and rental rates,” says Brown. “The architecture, it's good if [tenants] like it or [think] it will help appeal to their clientele.” Village Pointe East is in a high-traffic, visible location, directly across from a new “lifestyle center” (or Main Street–style mall) in an upscale part of Omaha, and the rental rates, at $18 per square foot, are competitive, Brown says.

Still, he had fun with the $2 million project, on which Randy Brown Architects served as general contractor (as on 120 Blondo and Monarch Place, finished in 2006). A ribbon of copper panels winds from the trash pen at the bottom of the hill (a Randy Brown signature is the care he takes to tidy away dumpsters), up a beacon that announces the center to passing cars on Dodge Street, and around the front of the building, which is also composed of sandy brick and aluminum storefront doors and windows. “We used the same materials [as other buildings in the area], but we just did it in a way that is more logical, more clean and modern, and not at all fussy,” says Brown.

Beds of native grasses and pea gravel soften the concrete walkways and asphalt, while Z-shaped steel benches add grace notes of visual interest. “I know the design has worked,” he says, “because of the outdoor space. We designed an outdoor space, then someone [Subway] came along and said they wanted it.”

Brown also devised an alternative to the typical strip-mall store sign, stuck onto the façade like an oversized fridge magnet. He created gaps in the copper plating so that some signs, like the martini bar's, could be inset to lie flush with the copper. Why not a projecting steel frame to hold simple polycarbonate signs, like the one he used on the Blondo project? “We learned that tenants really want to have these canned letters,” Brown explains. “They fought us night and day on [Blondo]. So it's one of the things we have to concede.”

Randy Brown Architects and Quantum have collaborated on three further strip-mall projects: Monarch Place, in the Omaha suburb of Papillion (where “we could only get $10 to $12 a square foot, so [construction] had to be cheaper”); Village Pointe South, currently under construction; and Monarch Place II, across the street from Monarch Place, which will begin construction this month. Brown declines to reveal Quantum's gross annual profits from the malls but offers Village Pointe East as a telling example: In 2007, the partners together pocketed $100,000 after their expenditures (which included what they paid themselves in management fees).

However, Brown says, the real test will come when many tenants' five-year leases are up for renewal over the next couple of years. “We haven't lost one tenant yet, and [the malls] are 100 percent full. The challenge will be when we start having turnover.” Quantum has kept its current tenants in place as long as it has, says Brown, partly by being selective: “We didn't rent to people we thought might be gone in six months.” And as Quantum's reputation has grown, attracting tenants has become a little easier. “People know the name, so real estate agents who might be repping a Kinko's are thinking they want to bring clients to our centers.”

For Brown the architect, strip malls represent an opportunity to revise and improve an inescapable feature of the suburban landscape. “Utopian architects would say that you shouldn't design strip malls,” he says. “But [they're] a reality of who we are today and how we live. So how do we do the best ones we can possibly do?” Apart from this challenge, the strip malls also bring revenue that can be applied to other, riskier projects. Brown's firm and Quantum recently completed Hidden Creek, a small development of modern “eco-homes” backing onto a nature reserve on the western fringes of Omaha. “Another developer would never take a chance on a project like that,” says Brown. What's more, Hidden Creek has opened up a previously untapped market for Brown's architectural practice: custom homes. “By being a developer and doing some [residential] stuff on our own, other people have seen it, and they want to hire us. It's worked really well from that standpoint.”

But Brown is adamant that he will never give up outside clients—in fact, after a couple of years devoted mainly to Quantum-financed projects, he expects to do two or three times as much client work as Quantum work in 2008.

“We're limited with what we can do as developers,” he explains. “We're never going to do a museum as a developer. We're never going to do a big cultural project. If you want to do that, you have to also work for third-party clients. That's why I'm trying to find a balance.”

What you can learn from Randy Brown:

• Capital isn't that hard to come by. “You just borrow money—you use other people's money. That's the big secret, how little money you have to put in.”
• Local roots count. Brown worked in Los Angeles after completing his M.Arch. at the University of California, Los Angeles, but decided to move back to Omaha, his hometown. “Living in L.A., I was one of a thousand hungry young architects. I didn't think I was ever going to get anywhere.” In Omaha, he makes the most of family connections.
• Get better as you go. Brown says he's become a better general contractor and property manager—better at negotiating leases and at refining, for instance, store door systems—with each project.
• Become a developer to open up new practice areas. Once Brown's firm, with Quantum, had built a small housing development, clients began to approach him with residential work.