ANTI-MALL BREAKS WALLS TO DRAW GENERATION X.

Byline: Jennifer Steinhauer The New York Times

Shaheen Sadeghi owns a shopping strip here, where he makes a sweet living providing space to hip stores that cater to shoppers in their 20s.

But he is not really in the retail business, Sadeghi insists. He prefers to call himself a ``conceptualist,'' responsible for controlling the strip's ``vibe.''

Sadeghi has put together an increasingly successful shopping center, known as The Lab, full of cutting-edge tenants, served up in an atmosphere designed to lure in a generation disenchanted with the cookie-cutter look and feel of just about every suburban mall in the country.

Don't look for Starbucks Coffee here. There will be no softer side of Sears. Mrs. Fields, that ultimate cookie hawker? Woefully out of touch. Those ubiquitous shops selling leather pants, shimmery first-date shirts or dangling earrings, two for $5? No way.

Instead, there are more than a dozen stores offering surf wear, authentic plastic Jesus statues and college-radio CDs, all enclosed by broken walls, ripped up carpet and a do-it-yourself community garden.

And above all, Sadeghi says, don't call The Lab a mall. No, it's an ``anti-mall.''

And that's the genius behind Sadeghi's approach. For by targeting a special age group and marketing to that group's perceived set of aesthetic and spending values, he has managed to tap into the most popular form of specialty retailing around without appearing to do so.

``They call themselves the anti-mall, but that is just really very clever marketing,'' said Mark Schoifet, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers in New York.

``It has been very important for malls to differentiate themselves, and niche marketing is becoming more and more important in the shopping center business.''

Starting with just a handful of stores, Sadeghi opened his anti-mall three years ago in a former military night goggle factory. It is in the heart of conservative Orange County, just down the road from the South Coast Plaza, an archetype of the luxury shopping center.

The anchor, Urban Outfitters, offers the disaffected uniform of Generation X - T-shirts meant to be worn a size too small, bowling bags-cum-evening bags, black sunglasses. Tower Records set up a store offering mostly ``alternative'' music. (Translation: If the band you are looking for can be found in a magazine pull-out card for a record club, you're in the wrong place.)

Now, there are 16 tenants, with more to come. In addition to the better-known Urban Outfitters and Tower, they have more obscure names like Spanish Fly, where jaded shoppers can find ultra-camp plastic Elvis busts and religious-kitsch items, and The Closet, which offers clothing for surfing, skating and snowboarding.

There's a comic-book store and several small apparel shops. The coffee bar is not a chain, and the restaurant is Cuban.

The anti-mall disdains chrome, skylights and food courts, preferring instead to maintain the warehouse look with exposed steel rods sticking out from the walls and lots of cement.

The space is further embellished with paintings and drawings by local artists and ready-made objects, giving it the slightly risque feel of a squatter den.

``We are approaching this from a very purified point of view,'' said Sadeghi, 41, whose background is in designing clothing and surf wear, and who says he started The Lab when he realized that there was money to be made in alternatives to the standard shopping mall.

He combined his undergraduate degree in business, his studies at the Pratt Institute and work on Seventh Avenue to make it happen.

``We like it to have that personal feel,'' he added. ``It's not like a typical mall where everything is real cold and you don't know who owns it.''

One wall is covered with odds and ends ranging from oil paintings to antique kitchen equipment, and in the center is an open space called The Living Room, where the kind of furniture found at a garage sale has been set up for shoppers to sit and sip their fruit whips by the light of lamps fashioned from old carburetor filters.

The juxtaposition of a nearby fancy hair salon close to the wall covered with poems and old potato peelers leaves one with the impression that Marcel Duchamp had been enlisted to fix up a Neiman Marcus.

``I just love this building,'' Sadeghi said. ``It gives us authenticity, because it is so honest. We just don't have that many old buildings around here.'' (The building dates from the 1950s.)

With its carefully honed rough edges, The Lab is probably best understood not so much as the antithesis of conventional retailing today but as a quintessential example of the latest trends in marketing.