The Shops at Boudreau

High-end clientele continues.

Business owners in The Shops at Boudreau at the intersection of Bellerose Drive and Boudreau Road have no problem coming up with superlatives about the commercial centre they occupy.

“It was perfect for what we wanted to do,” said Adamo Rossi, who owns the family-operated food retailer Italian Bakery’s Mercato.

‘It’s very well-rounded,” added Thyda Lim, a hairstylist and proprietor of Suburbia Hair Spa. “And you’re not here looking for basic services and basic supplies. You’re looking at top-tier in everything you see around here.”

That positivity is a common mantra among the merchants that occupy The Shops at Boudreau, billed as a “new-generation” neighbourhood shopping centre when it first opened in 2014. Instead of copying the conventional mall model consisting of a series of concrete building-block structures surrounded by an asphalt oasis, the complex treats visitors to a more European-style boutique look. 

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Structures on the 2.2-hectare lot are no taller than two stories, all graced with a textured exterior of cast stones with varying shades of Sioux City bricks. An abundance of walkways provides pedestrians with easy access to each store, with one path leading to the northern bank of the Sturgeon River. The surroundings include a great deal of green space, doubling as a park complete with benches and a canopy.

Besides Mercato and Suburbia, other businesses promising an array of goods and services to suit more discriminating clientele include XIX Nineteen restaurant, interior specialists California Closets, spa chain Frilly Lilly, and java joint Good Earth Coffeehouse. They’re among some 30 businesses in a complex boasting a cumulative 52,585 square feet of commercial space, designed to bring in more high-end customers living nearby.

St. Albert having one of the highest average household incomes in the country and close proximity to Edmonton, made it an ideal destination for an upscale boutique shopping experience.

Chris Sherry, president of Vancouver-based Narland Investments Ltd., which bought the complex from the site’s original developer Chrisen Realty Corporation of Edmonton in 2022.

Chrisen’s president Stewart Gillespie originally dreamed up the idea for a boutique-style centre in St. Albert after he had purchased the land in 2013 from the Hole family, owners of the venerable Hole’s Greenhouses, which had relocated to The Enjoy Centre two years earlier. The company had already built a similar complex in Edmonton’s Crestwood community and believed that a similar version would do well in the gardening establishment’s old location.

A MoneySense study at the time bore that out, citing St. Albert as Canada’s second-most affluent city (behind Calgary and considerably ahead of 11th-place Edmonton), boasting an annual average household income of $139,628. It also helped that the land was close to some of St. Albert’s more prosperous neighborhoods like Erin Ridge, Inglewood, Kingswood and Oakmont.

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That year, Gillespie worked closely with the Hole family on fine-tuning the boutique proposal and persuaded St. Albert City Council to approve the $26-milion project. Around that time, Rossi, whose family had been operating the Italian Bakery in Edmonton since 1960, was asked by Gillespie to see some plans he had made for the development. Rossi was impressed once he saw them. 

“Once we sat down and we got all the details in order, it was a no-brainer for us,” he said. “We were pretty excited when we met, because we didn’t know it was going to go that well. So, he sold us on the idea, and it was a hit.”

Lim didn’t need any encouragement to get a shingle hung on a lot on the new site. A hair stylist for 10 years with another salon in St. Albert, she had never owned a business. But once she heard about the development, she jumped at the opportunity to own and run a shop at what she believed was an ideal location. 

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“This is going to be a landmark,” recalled Lim saying to herself at the time. “This is a place that people are going to be drawn to. This would be a perfect place to open a salon or business, if I wanted to. It felt right to me.” Her business wound up being the first tenant at The Shops at Boudreau, while the area was still under construction.

The area and the Hole legacy might have drawn Lim to set up shop there, but she’s found that the complex has developed a social atmosphere all its own over time. “For a commercial space, the amount of community that’s in here is better than anywhere else in any part of the city,” she said. “We actually know each other. And we actually try to support each other.”

That same vibe permeating throughout The Shops at Boudreau also turned into a bonus amenity for Rossi’s business. “It definitely was a hit,” he said about the success of Mercato. “The community really, really embraced us, which was very, very important for us.”