Cernica Park

Belgian developer Liebrecht & wooD originally announced this Ilfov County site in 2015 as Cernica Park, an ambitious €110-200 million, 88,000-100,000 sqm retail scheme with a Fashion House outlet, hypermarket, DIY store and sporting-goods anchor. That plan didn’t proceed as announced; instead, the developer built a substantially smaller, single-format project on the site, Fashion House Outlet Centre Pallady, which opened May 27, 2021, becoming Fashion House Group’s seventh outlet in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia and its second in Bucharest, after the Militari location that had operated since December 2008.

At just over 12,000 sqm, Fashion House Pallady opened with 62 stores, a children’s play area, restaurants and more than 300 free parking spaces, with over 75 percent of space pre-let at opening. The property sits on the A2 motorway at kilometre 15, the Cernica exit, roughly 25 minutes from central Bucharest, positioned to draw from a catchment the developer estimated at more than 3 million people. The opening was itself delayed from an originally planned March 25, 2021 date after road authority CNAIR announced repair work on the A2 that would have complicated access.

Puma, Tom Tailor, Lee Cooper, Triumph, Ecco, US Polo Assn and United Colors of Benetton anchor the outlet’s fashion floor, with Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and Adidas added in a second phase that opened in June 2022. Architecture firm DMA designed the property around an open-air “village” concept, with separate individual store entrances styled after interwar Bucharest’s Belle Époque architecture, a design approach distinct from Fashion House’s original, more conventional Militari location.

That outcome, a single-format, 12,000 sqm outlet village replacing what had been announced as a 88,000+ sqm multi-anchor retail park, reflects how thoroughly Liebrecht & wooD scaled back its original Cernica ambitions once construction actually began, even as the developer’s underlying land position and access-road investment carried through into the smaller project that did get built.