When it comes to designing old-fashioned “Main Street” retail projects, one of the nation’s most highly regarded architects is Richard Huelsman, president of West Los Angeles-based MCG Architects.

Among the main street-type projects MCG is designing are a 210,000-square-foot project on South Lake Avenue in Pasadena, the 25,000-square-foot Hollywood Galaxy on Hollywood Boulevard and a 16-block stretch of downtown Cleveland.

In a recent interview, Huelsman offered his views on the newest retail trend.

Question: What are the special challenges of developing main-street areas, as opposed to indoor malls?

Answer: In a regional mall you are really controlling the shopping environment. On a street, you don’t have that control and have to give the shopper ease of movement among shops on either side of the street. Sometimes you can do this by closing off the street like at Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

We have nice weather in Southern California, but climate is still a consideration. In a desert area you’ve got to have good shading and screens to cover where people walk. There’s also the challenge of providing good lighting and safety, to avoid dark niches where a person will feel threatened. And you have to create signs where people driving and walking by can identify the user.

Q: Are there areas around town you see as especially ripe for this type of redevelopment?

A: There are some tremendous opportunities in downtown Los Angeles for developers to create wonderful streetscapes. One thing I look forward to is the planned sports complex. This would be wonderful for downtown because of the traffic and income it would generate. In other cities, when a sports complex goes in, there is a steady 35 to 40 percent rise in sales of nearby retail shops.

Q: What is an example of a local open-air retail redevelopment that has worked well?

A: One of my favorites is Sunset Plaza along Sunset Boulevard, where we’ve seen a wonderful mixture of new residential, offices, retail and entertainment in the last few years. There’s an architectural warmth and vibrancy among the different users that calls you as you drive by to get out and walk to the cafes, and shop and participate.

Q: When malls came into vogue years ago, they were popular because everything was available conveniently. Were there other features responsible for the popularity of enclosed malls?

A: As the population base expanded, urban-area downtowns weren’t large enough to handle it, and people moved to the suburbs and didn’t want to drive downtown to shop. People in the United States shop very differently than Europeans, who make a day of shopping. They’ll go to one shop to buy their fish, to another for cheese and another for their socks and another for their shoes.

Americans want one-stop shopping and it’s our challenge to give it to them to shop, be entertained and eat out all at the same time.

Q: Do you also think people have just gotten tired of being inside these enclosed malls?

A: To some extent, yes. It’s really the architect’s challenge and developer’s challenge try to change people’s perception.

The typical shelf-life of a regional shopping center as it is developed is seven to 10 years. After that life cycle, they need to be redeveloped, freshened up with new tenants or a new appearance with new floors or new lighting, ceilings, planting or landscaping.

The way people think of regional malls today is much different than it was 15 or 20 years ago, and it’s up to us to create a town center.

In California we have a benefit that not too many cities have: We have wonderful weather out here, so we can afford to do open-air malls.

Q: Your firm is doing a lot of open-air redevelopment in the Los Angeles area, such as your South Lake Avenue project in Pasadena. Will it be a touristy destination like Old Town Pasadena, which has had so much acclaim?

A: Old Town was developed to bring out-of-towners into Pasadena and have more than just a provincial town. South Lake Avenue is now going to be developed to complement that project. The people who live in Pasadena also wanted a place to be entertained, to eat out on an upscale basis.

In any good, successful main-street project there’s a combination of different kinds of shops just like there’s a combination of different kinds of office space and housing.

The South Lake Avenue project will be designed as very sophisticated, very elegant shops. So they will be very much in character with the existing area. Some main streets really appreciate that, other main streets would rather have excitement and neon lights. Old Town has a little bit more of that glitz, while South Lake Avenue is more sedate and upscale.

Q: Do Angelenos have peculiarities as far as tastes or demands for main streets?

A: L.A. and other Southern Calfornia areas are a little less parochial in their way of looking at projects. They’re willing to experiment with new ideas to make the projects better, to make them more exciting.

Q: What’s an example of this?

A: A great example of this is CityWalk. A wonderful project that has retail, entertainment and complements the studio that creates a real tourist destination. I’m not sure you’ll see a project like that matched anywhere else in the country. There are several projects like that in Southern California that you probably couldn’t do elsewhere because of the weather, because of the amusement parks that complement that kind of project.