Fairfax Corner

Fairfax Corner is only halfway completed, with another phase to be built in the next couple years. It is located only five minutes from the older Fair Oaks Mall and Fair Lakes strip mall. The site was intended to become something different than its surrounding area, neither an indoor mall nor a strip mall. They wanted an environment that didn’t exist in that part of Fairfax. It has become a destination with a variety of uses that creates other reasons besides retail for people to come back. A study of the aerials of Fair Lakes, Fair Oaks, and Fairfax Corner show how they differ.

Aerials of Fair Oaks Mall, Fair Lakes Shopping Center, and Fairfax Corner

Fairfax Corner is an outdoor lifestyle center with a pedestrian central plaza, sidewalks, and roads in a grid pattern around the central plaza, and buildings with retail and restaurants on the outermost ring. The development of the buildings radiate concentrically from the central plaza, and the massing on Fairfax Corner reflects this.

One of the first buildings to be erected was the Fairfax Corner movie theater. This became one of the first programmatic elements (below) with a few restaurants following soon after. Since then, buildings with ground floor retail, commercial offices on 2nd and 3rd levels, apartments, and a hotel have been built. The future phasing includes parking garages, more offices, apartments, and retail. They will consolidate the perimeter surface parking lots into parking garages with retail storefront on the ground floor, and some with commercial offices atop the parking garages. More apartments are also to be built with ground floor retail and basement parking garages. The timeline of the development of Fairfax Corner shows the phasing of these buildings.

The central plaza for Fairax County has a very interesting story. When Fairfax Corner first opened, the movie theatre, plaza, and a few restaurants existed. The plaza was prety much a grassy field with sidewalks, and nothing ever took place on it. After a second wave of buildings went up, they decided to do something else with it, and put up large construction walls. Those walls were up for a year. When the walls came down, a beautiful brick paved plaza emerged. The plaza went mostly unused initially. Over the years, benches and a water feature were added, and the plaza began to attract more people. This last year, they put up a canopy above a raised portion of the plaza, and now are attracting bands and schools to come put on productions. The most recent addition this summer were public tables with umbrella canopies. These do not belong to a particular restaurant, but to the public.