Araz Shopping Mall

Let's dream bigger

Modern, stunning, infectiously passionate, witty, a smart piece of architecture. The new shopping mall in Baku also builds on the best of what other malls previously had.

The head of Azerbaijan’s leading supermarket chain, Aydin Talibov, contacted our architectural team with a brief to design a new shopping mall to house their supermarket brand as anchor tenant of the mall in the centre of Baku. The 12000m2 multi-storey development situated over three floors houses a 2080m2 Araz supermarket.

The main idea was to change the perception of the local mall and supermarket as it exists today in Azerbaijan. The CampbellRigg team, integrated the supermarket into the mall design forming the anchor tenant for fashion retailer LC Waikiki, the “fast fashion” store chain, a Pepco shop offering apparel for the whole family, household goods and toys at the lowest prices and a pharmacy and drugstore chain Rossmann to help form a destination centre where you could spend half a day.

The architect's design allows a large amount of natural light through glazed elevation and is a key driver of CampbellRigg's design approach. Allowing for a flexible structural design, whilst designing for efficient energy usage and maintaining comfortable interior conditions for visitors, was a key aim for the client.

For the supermarket design, our planning principles were to: - create a more intuitive easy to shop customer journey, place destination ‘hero’ brands in anchor locations, develop a warm and welcoming first impression and engage customers with a considerate approach to disabled and parents and child parking within the exterior environment.