Shopping Centres: The 14-year-old Omni Park Shopping Centre is to get a fashion extension that aims to attract major Irish and international retailers. Jack Fagan reports

Even the most successful shopping centres in the Dublin area have been opening dedicated fashion malls to cater for a new generation of shoppers.

Blanchardstown Town Centre, trading a mere nine years, recently installed the Red Mall to keep fashion multiples away from the competing Westend fashion enclave in the same area. Before that The Square in Tallaght recognised the demand for a fashion facility and duly made the space available to cater for many of the leading fashion multiples.

Now the 14-year-old Omni Park Shopping Centre, off the M1 between the city and Dublin Airport, is also getting in on the act by building a €60 million fashion extension to cater for a range of Irish and international traders who want to open in the north Dublin suburb.

The McKeon and Kennedy families who own the centre will also be upgrading the existing shopping mall which has traded exceptionally well over the years because of the dense population in the immediate area.

More than 450,000 people live within a 15-minute drive of the centre.

The extension under way will provide an additional 17,000sq m (182,986sq ft) of shopping space incorporating about 35 retail units ranging in size from 49-2,357sq m (527-25,370sq ft). With most fashion traders now looking for ever larger units, the average new shop in Omni will be 190sq m (2,045sq ft) which will rent at around €100,000 per annum. However, the flexible layout and the fact that retailing space is also available at first floor level will allow the centre to accommodate some of the largest operators.

Stephen Murray of letting agents Jones Lang LaSalle says that some of the large district and regional shopping centres around the country have already provided spacious units to cater for Irish and international fashion traders.

These have included The Square in Tallaght, Blanchardstown, Crescent in Limerick, Wilton in Cork and several others.

Apart altogether from the extra capacity, he said it was equally important to make this area easily accessible for fashion shoppers.

It was also not sufficient to maintain the car-parking ratio, it was necessary to increase it in most cases.

The opening of the Omni fashion mall next October will coincide with the completion of the nearby Port Tunnel which will vastly improve access between the city centre and the MI at Santry.

The extension will be accessed directly from a new multi-storey car-park which will bring the number of free car-parking spaces on the site to over 1,700.

Once the work has been completed, the overall size of Omni will be increased to 43,012sq m (462,981sq ft). Existing traders include Tesco, Penneys, Vera Moda, Claire's Accessories, Adams Children's Wear, Specsavers and Homebase.

Omni also houses Ireland's second largest cinema complex with an 11-screen multiplex which was recently extended to seat 2,300 customers.

Omni has stood the test of time because of its village-style buildings around the 23-acre site, most of them only two-storey with red slates and a mixture of pitched and canopied roof lines.

Unlike most other shopping centres it looks out rather than in - something that it is now being demanded by the planners at Liffey Valley and Stillorgan.

The traditional layout of big shopping centres with everything on the inside is no longer fashionable with the planners.

They are now looking for streetscapes with a mixture of residential and commercial buildings.

This will leave the way open for Omni to expand further in the future given the huge grounds available.