A lot of people understandably love the Village now because it's brand new, it's fresh, and there's nothing like it. But newness doesn't last forever, and if I were an investor I'd have serious concerns about its long term future.
For example, take the decision to build everything in "Old World" European architecture. In real-life Europe, the architecture looks the way it does because it evolved over centuries of construction and destruction. It is the way it is for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with Idaho. So the act of replicating it doesn't make sense, and even if it did you can't do it overnight and expect it to look authentic. It's new enough that people generally aren't looking at it with a critical eye. But the more time people spend there, the more fake it's going to look. They won't be able to escape that.
But the Village has tried by pouring huge sums of money into every detail of the design. The result is that you have a theme park atmosphere where nothing is organic and everything is just so. Without the human element of genuine unpredictability, once the newness wears off it will feel phony and tacky. That's the problem with glitzy design in general--it's great when it's fresh. But if it's not fresh, and it's not best, it'll become a "has been" so fast you won't believe it. And it's very difficult to recover from that.
Just look at the fate of enclosed malls across the US. Or look at big entertainment districts from the 90s built overnight. The kind with Planet Hollywood, or Hard Rock Cafe. Look at the Boise Spectrum. Towne Square Mall. Look at Reno and Las Vegas in the aftermath of Dubai and Macau.
The Village probably could have avoided this by locating itself in downtown Meridian. Instead of trying to build everything from scratch, do it the BoDo way. Incorporate history, carefully build new buildings in the gaps of old ones, so everything organically meshes together. But alas, they didn't. And I'm kind of happy they didn't because it does offer a unique shopping experience in the Treasure Valley. Not my cup of tea, but for many it is. I just see it going down the same path as the Boise Spectrum--being the place to be for a while, and then fading over time.
Last edited by BoiseAirport; Apr 4, 2015 at 12:26 AM.
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As a northender I support redeveloping this "historical" area to look and feel for more like the Village. To answer you question-No, there's absolutely no way that that is going to happen. I will admit, the article had Fooled me at first too before I remembered that Boise Weekly had also put out an article last year saying that Boise State had decided that it was time to switch their blue field back to the traditional green turf.
I understood the Jamba Juice failing though because the owner was too cheap to invest in anything warm, so during winter business was....bad.
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