The mall's Sears is the standard art deco-ish design they used on a lot of 90s stores, which I quite like (though it irritates me how both it and the mall proper use horizontal stripes, and they come come close but don't quite match up). I feel like mall department store buildings built after the 60s or 70s often ended up being super boring (like the Macy's and JCPenney here), and Sears in particular had a lot of very boring stores around here, so it's nice that they went against the trend and built some nice stores in the tail end of the mall era.
Even after all these years, I still don't know what to make of 1990s Sears with this type of design. Prior to the 1990s, more or less, Sears used to give each store a unique exterior design. Sometimes these unique designs weren't all that fancy, but at least each store had a different look. I don't think there were two Houston area Sears stores that looked alike even though some of them were built in the same era.
ReplyDeleteThen, Sears started going towards a more standardized design. We had one Sears with this design in Houston, the one at Pasadena Town Square which replaced a freestanding Sears down the street that had been around for decades. That Pasadena Town Square Sears was the last Sears to close in the Houston area and then re-opened briefly as a Sears Hometown store last year even though the mall is as close to a dead mall as one can get while still technically being open (the mall has had several new names in recent years and I can't even remember which name they are using now, lol).
Anyway, while the standardized look is a bit of a boring thing, I think Sears did a better job with their standardized look than other department stores at the time such as Foley's (May Department Stores at the time) and Dillard's. Those two had very boring, predictable looks. At least Sears' design had some flair to it. Those stores were more upscale looking on the inside than previous Sears stores as well.
Well, if nothing else, this Sears looks better than the emoji JCPenney, but at least the JCPenney is still open.
Hmm, interesting! I hadn't realized they didn't have a standardized design before this -- all of the ones I've ever visited were quite bland and often quite similar looking (either grey stucco or dark brick, sometimes with a white stucco base for multi-story stores).
DeleteYep, definitely the nicest of the three anchor stores here!