JOHANNESBURG - Ghana's Kumasi City Mall, developed by leading South African property development and investment company Atterbury, has won the first ever Africa Property Investment (API) Award for retail real estate.
The awards, announced at the recent API Summit and Expo 2017 held in Sandton Central, recognise innovation and outstanding achievement.
Kumasi City Mall was selected as the best retail project from a strong field of world-class calibre entries.
The new awards, with a unique focus on sub-Saharan African real estate, are judged on a wide range of criteria including integration into the environment, originality of concept, technical and architectural quality, sensitivity to the local community, innovation, sustainability, response to market demands, financial performance, and the impact of the project on economic convergence. Atterbury developed Kumasi City Mall for its owners, Delico Kumasi Limited and AttAfrica has been appointed as the asset manager and is responsible for its day-to-day running and operations.
Boogertman and partners were the architects responsible for the design of the award-winning mall. The world-class 18,500sqm modern building is built on a total land area of more than 15 acres and has the potential to expand up to 28,000sqm.
It is located in the city of Kumasi, the Ashanti region’s capital, which is Ghana’s second largest metropolitan centre after Accra. The mall is the first and only mall in the entire northern sector of the country. It took 24 months to develop and opened on April 20, 2017. It is based on the African notion of gathering under the trees and as such is rooted within a Ghanaian forest analogy and the context of Kumasi.
The building includes innovative features such as using composite timber as cladding and breezeblock walls. The design stays architecturally sensitive to the region and includes green building features like natural ventilation, wastewater harvesting and LED lighting.