New Outlet for Retro Charms?

By many a measure, the Brentwood Country Mart is so, well, un-Brentwood.

For starters, it resembles a big red New England barn. Its mainstays have been old-fashioned services: shoe repair, camera shop, barbershop. Not a salon with hundred-dollar cuts, but a barbershop.

But that’s why many people love it, and why some are now fretting about its future.

As a new owner attempts to revive the mart’s flagging fortunes, many Brentwood residents are eyeing the arrival of new high-end boutiques with skepticism -- out of concern that the mart will become too hoity-toity. This in an area where the average annual household income is said to be more than $260,000.

“What we were used to has become more upscale,” said Bunny Feuer, who has frequented the mart for 34 years. “It definitely has a different feel to it.”

Even her son, a clotheshorse in his early 40s, found the new men’s clothing shop “way too expensive,” Feuer said.

The effort to rescue the mart without ruining its ambience speaks to a larger issue: how to keep independent retailers alive in trendy, high-rent areas.

Brentwood has prided itself on retaining some of those businesses -- Vicente Foods and Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore, for example -- that have been lost elsewhere. Yet chain outlets, such as Whole Foods and Starbucks, exist in abundance along San Vicente Boulevard, the neighborhood’s main shopping street.

To understand the affection and concerns surrounding the Brentwood Country Mart, it helps to know something about Brentwood and how the mart in its early days came to be a neighborhood hangout -- in a neighborhood where those hanging out included Elizabeth Taylor and Burt Lancaster.

Brentwood was a budding community in 1948 when two entrepreneurs opened the mart on 26th Street near San Vicente, touting it as 26 shops at one stop selling “bananas or buns, codfish or candy, flowers or flour.”

Billed as an “innovation in modern merchandising,” it featured a warren of mom-and-pop shops, two courtyards and brick walkways. It was, to a great extent, a more upscale knockoff of the Farmers Market in the Fairfax district.

At the time, Brentwood offered little else in the way of retail. The mart filled a need, with early promotional pictures showing a parade of Hollywood heavy hitters: Spencer Tracy, Robert Mitchum, Leslie Caron and the oft-photographed Shirley Temple, who posed next to a toddler in a wooden grocery cart.

The first owners, Louis M. Semtei and A.L. Levin, marketed their center nonstop, celebrating every holiday from New Year’s Day to Christmas. Bozo the Clown put in an appearance. Fashion shows were staged beside the fire pit in the main courtyard.

In 1971, Topa Equities Chairman John E. Anderson, for whom UCLA’s Anderson business school was named, acquired the property. Under Topa’s management, a succession of grocery stores foundered. Neighbors successfully battled efforts to bring in a Ralphs and then a Trader Joe’s and over the years mounted “save the mart” petition drives.

When developer James S. Rosenfield bought the 30,000-square-foot mart in early 2003, it was more than 40% empty, having lost its food market, post office and candy store. One patron had posted a woeful sign: “Dear Santa, Please bring back our post office.”

In addition to restoring the post office, Rosenfield is resurrecting the calendar of special events. In December, Santa Claus held court. Each child who hopped onto his lap received a follow-up letter, modeled on a 1950s-vintage Santa reply from the mart’s archives.

The mart still lures A-list celebrities. (Look, there goes Maria Shriver!) But it is also the low-key hideaway where Marilou Lockwood, continuing a long-held family tradition, often treats her 4 1/2 -year-old granddaughter, Christina Shirley, to an al fresco lunch beside the cozy fire pit.

“I started bringing my son here when he was 2 1/2 ; he’s now 41,” Lockwood said. “It’s a very significant place to us. I’m so excited about what’s happening here.”

Rosenfield and the mart’s new merchants are investing millions of dollars in a makeover of the aging mall, which, some observers say, reached a nadir when it leased space to a tooth-whitening business.

Rosenfield, 42, recently restored another endangered urban species: the single-screen Aero Theater on Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue.

Although it’s too soon to tell whether the mart’s strategy will succeed, Rosenfield’s efforts have impressed Rick Caruso, who developed the Grove in the Fairfax district and other high-end shopping centers. Caruso walks his children to the barbershop for regular haircuts. “I love it there,” he said. “My only complaint is that they’re not open on Sundays.... It’s very much the old school.”

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, Rosenfield visited the mart on trips to and from the beach, and he was struck by its community feeling and the ease with which movie stars mingled with regular folk. With its small spaces and narrow passageways, the mart is almost the antithesis of today’s popular big-box retailers. It’s like Main Street in a mall.

After watching the mart slip, Rosenfield two years ago decided to buy the structure and a long-term ground lease in a transaction valued at $30 million.

At a time when most shopping center builders are chasing the latest design fads, Rosenfield is thinking retro, even quaint.

Guided by boyhood memories and the original owners’ scrapbook, he is restoring white-trimmed Dutch doors and multi-paned windows. He had painters re-create the Brentwood Pharmacy sign on the 26th Street facade (even though the pharmacy has moved) and the white-gold lettering for the mart’s U.S. Post Office Substation No. 1.

He aims, in fact, to restore the structure to the way it looked in its postwar days, back when some patrons arrived by horseback. “I’m spending a fortune on preservation, and it’s scary,” Rosenfield said. “But I’m also getting results. People want to be a part of it.”

Avoiding “name brands,” Rosenfield has scoured the globe for lesser-known tenants who can deliver friendly service in nooks as dinky as 300 square feet.

They are joining such veterans as Reddi Chick, which for more than 25 years has served rotisserie chicken and fries to patrons who sit at picnic tables in the mart’s central courtyard. (Hey, there’s Dustin Hoffman, tickling his grandbaby!)

Among those that have set up shop are Flora and Henri, a children’s clothier with stores in Seattle and New York; Jigsaw, a London retailer of women’s and girls’ apparel; Sugar Paper, a stationer also in Century City; and Apartment Number 9, a men’s haberdasher with a store in Chicago. (And there’s Michael Keaton, looking at shirts!)

Rosenfield pursued Flora and Henri with a lover’s zeal for years. “He’s not the developer who wants to get everything that every other city has,” said Amy Augustine, vice president of Flora and Henri, which sells a range of basics such as T-shirts and leggings ($25 to $36) and a signature collection that includes $230 dresses.

Coming this summer will be City Bakery, a popular eatery from lower Manhattan that will be the closest thing to a food store that patrons have seen in years and will move the mart a bit closer to its roots.

Given the surrounding area’s wealth, Rosenfield said he believes that the stores he is recruiting will be a good fit.

“I think there will be demand for boutique shops,” he said.

Though he vows to keep much of the retro charm, there are two major changes he’s considering, with a nod to the present: Sunday hours and valet parking.

“I’m in love with this place. Nothing will ever happen to it.”