• Project Name: Filmhouse Circle Mall;
• Client: Filmhouse Cinemas;
• Architect: STOA Architects;
• Location: Circle Mall, Osapa – Lagos;
• Main Contractor: Mablak Engineering Limited;
• Project Manager: Templegate Consultants Limited;
• Structural Engineer: Civil Sys;
• MEP Engineer: Melcon M Nigeria;
• Quantity Surveyor: Frinas;

Four years after its completion, Circle Mall is finally going to have a cinema! The mall was developed in 2015 by RMB Westport and PMN Investments, a subsidiary of Paragon Holdings. The mall opened in a period we outlined as The Boom & Second Tier Expansion, in our Boom & Bust report. During this period 199,600 sqm of space was added to the total stock of formal retail in Nigeria, spurred by capital raises by institutional investors, as well as, the narrative of a rising Africa.

Circle Mall is a small strip mall with a size of 10,800 sqm in Osapa London, Lekki. It was created to cater to the residents of Osapa and Jakande, a residential area and non-core city in the Lekki axis of Lagos which has a relatively small market. The mall, anchored by Shoprite, was completed without the inclusion of a cinema sub anchor, similar to Achimota Mall, Accra, Ghana.

For Circle Mall, this was an unusual choice because it is surrounded by a number of multi-family residential estates. Concerns about potential competition from other shopping mall including Actis’ 28,000 sqm Twin Lakes Mall in Twin Lakes Estate, Novare Lekki, the now-suspended Royal Gardens Mall and a few other early conceptual projects might have led to the decision to exclude the cinema in Circle Mall from the onset. However, this is being remedied, as Filmhouse Cinemas is currently constructing a 3-floor cinema in the north-east corner of the mall.

According to the projects Main Contractor, Mablak Engineering Limited, the cinema will have 4 screens, one of which would be an IMAX screen. They were also responsible for building Filmhouse’s IMAX Cinema in 2016. Construction of the Circle Mall cinema commenced July 2019 and is expected to be completed at the end of Q4:2019.

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