Melanie Mann and Jeff Alpert believe they’ve built a better mousetrap when it comes to suburban development, and considering how their Park Place project in Leawood has excelled during tough economic times, it’s hard to argue with them.

While most builders in southern Johnson County — long the metro area’s gold standard for retail development — have either failed to start projects or stumbled into bankruptcy since the recession hit several years ago, Park Place at 117th Street and Nall Avenue has thrived.

And it’s by design.

Combing the country for the best examples of what Mann calls “urban-style, mixed-use” developments, the partners have built $125 million worth of shops, offices, a hotel and a 700-space garage, all artfully contrived to re-create the atmosphere of a small town.

“It has a downtown feel,” said Leawood Mayor Peggy Dunn. “It’s created a sense of place, and there’s certainly a lot going on there.

“The density at Park Place is greater than anywhere else in Leawood, and that density has probably aided their development.”

Mann and Alpert had plenty of development experience on their own before becoming partners, but nothing they had done comes close to Park Place in sophistication. Their partnership has been the business equivalent of a successful marriage — one that’s survived multiple challenges but remains solid.

“We have a great relationship,” Alpert said. “It really is pretty much like family.”

And in addition to Park Place’s unique blend of uses and pedestrian amenities, it also helped that Mann and Alpert have rock-solid financial backing to help overcome the current pitfalls of commercial real estate.

A trust related to Cecil Van Tuyl, a low-profile Kansas City billionaire who made his fortune selling cars and developing real estate through his Mission business, is the key investor behind Park Place.

“We call it a three-legged stool,” Alpert said. “Number one is our location. It’s a superb location that has incredible potential on its own.

“Number two is the concept. We think our concept, besides being unique, is something that both tenants and the public have been drawn to in a pretty positive way.

“The third piece is the fact our equity partner has been committed enough to Park Place to ensure we maintain momentum through this unbelievably tough economic period.”

On a recent mild winter day, Ash Street, the block-long main drag of Park Place, with its broad sidewalks, its quaint streetlights and the colorful facades of its boutiques and restaurants, had a cozy feel that defied the usual car-dominated world of suburban shopping.

At the end of Ash, the Park Place ice skating rink was crowded with kids on winter break, parents sipping hot chocolate and watching from nearby tables.

It was a bit chilly for the outdoor café at the new Gordon Biersch, but it wasn’t hard to imagine having a cold beer or glass of wine and doing some serious people watching when fair weather returns.

In contrast, just south of Park Place was a sprawling parking lot surrounding the more traditional Leawood Town Center, with the typical maze of cars lying between shopper and store.

At Park Place, the cars are hidden in a multilevel garage that not only accommodates customers but buffers the small-town atmosphere within the development from the six lanes of traffic whizzing by on Nall.

The design of Park Place has been a hit with retailers and office users, with almost a half-million square feet of space built since construction started in 2005.

Last September, the development scored a major coup when AMC Entertainment decided to locate its headquarters there after being in downtown Kansas City its entire history.

“It’s the Country Club Plaza of the suburbs, the closest thing you can get in Johnson County,” said Ken Block, a respected Kansas City commercial real estate professional.

“They have all the good aspects of the Plaza, with amenities of better parking, great security and drawing customers from a great area.”

And this spring, Alpert and Mann plan to begin the first residential construction on their development, which lies just across Nall from the Sprint campus. A $30 million project with 177 luxury rental apartments and townhomes is on the way.

When fully built out over the next couple of years, the entire development will be valued at about $270 million.

The beginnings of Mann and Alpert’s partnership were in the late 1990s.

Mann was working with a development firm owned by Jim Ferrell of Ferrellgas. At the time, the Ferrell-led entity and Alpert were jointly developing a residential project called The Woods.

“I needed a sewer easement, and that’s how I met Jeff,” Mann said.

When Ferrell decided to leave The Woods development, Alpert and Mann paired up to complete it, forming a partnership called Village Associates.

It was a match made in development heaven, although both are a bit foggy about who asked whom.

“We each had an interest because both of us were exploring the idea of having partners,” Alpert said. “The partner I was dealing with was talking about retiring.”

Listening to them, it sounds like any courtship, only this one was business, not romance.

Because of their previous work with others on The Woods, Mann and Alpert already had gotten the measure of each other.

“We really were learning what we all want to know before we get married to somebody,” she said. “…We had complementary strengths.”

At first, Mann was less open to a partnership than Alpert.

“For the most part, I was a tennis player — you’re on the court by yourself and you want to lose by yourself,” Mann said. “It probably took me more of an adjustment, but it’s been a great partnership. … There are some parts of us that we’re really collaborative on, like design. He’s much more knowledgeable about construction than I am, so he takes the lead on construction.”

Partnering came naturally for Alpert.

“Whether it was my father or others, I’ve always developed in that partnership environment,” he said. “I saw her as being very analytical, very detail-oriented, just very bright in general.”

And they both have a passion for development.

Mann, 55, grew up with construction and development. Her father, Bill Mann, was a homebuilder, primarily in the Northland.

“My dad came back from World War II and started building houses with a shovel, literally,” she recalled. “It definitely was in my blood.

“There’s something about being on a job site,” Mann said. “You like the creativity aspect of it and the fact you’re building something that will be there for a while.”

Mann attended North Kansas City High School, went to the University of Arizona as an undergrad and received her law degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1981.

After practicing real estate law for five years, she went to work for St. Louis-based May Department Stores, handling all their corporate property in New York including Lord & Taylor.

Mann shrugged off the relative novelty of being a woman developer in an industry dominated by men.

“To be honest, I don’t think about the gender aspect that much,” she said. “Like everything, it gives you advantages and disadvantages.”

Her future business partner grew up in Prairie Village, also the child of a developer and builder.

Alpert graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School and got his bachelor’s degree in 1973 from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

That four-year stint in college was the only time the 60-year-old developer has not lived in Kansas City. Immediately after graduation, he went to work for his father, Don Alpert.

“I graduated on a Friday and started working on a Monday,” Alpert said. “Our first project was Mission Lake at 127th and Holmes, all residential, and from there we continued to do residential subdivisions in Johnson County.”

The last project Alpert started with his father was the 200-acre Hawthorne development, which included housing and a shopping center. His dad didn’t live to see the completion of Hawthorne Plaza, passing away in 1988.

Besides being close in age and children of builders, Mann and Alpert shared something else in common — geography.

Most of their earlier development projects were within the confines of one of Leawood’s more strategic real estate parcels, a sprawling section of land owned by the Douthat family. It has spawned developments including Edgewood, Leawood Country Manor, Leawood Commons and Leawood Town Center.

By the late 1990s, the chief parcel remaining in this family-owned tract was the 34-acre site that is now Park Place. And with all the experience Mann and Alpert had developing adjoining properties, they knew it was a prime location.

They wanted to do a project using the ideas of “new urbanism,” incorporating shops, offices and homes in a tight-knit, walkable way. Developments based on that concept were popping up around the nation in places like Mizner Park in Boca Raton, Fla., and Kierland Commons in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“We became very interested in the sustainability of it and the community building of it,” Mann said. “We spent a lot of time looking around the country at projects that had been developed during the past 80 years that were urban-style mixed use.

“You can start with the Country Club Plaza, because that’s one of the best ones in the country.”

The circumstances of how she met the eventual designer of Park Place were serendipitous.

“On Sept. 11, 2001, I was at an Urban Land Institute seminar checking out one of these design firms,” Mann said. “Then 9/11 happens and the tour we’re supposed to see that day, going to some projects throughout Miami, is canceled.”

Stuck in Miami with time on her hands, she rented a car and started touring projects on her own, among them Mizner Park.

“One of the designers from Street-Works, who is in the same situation, is walking around, so I introduce myself and I asked if he’d give me a tour of this project,” Mann said.

Street-Works, based in White Plains, N.Y., had a reputation for designing projects based on new urbanism.

“All the elements that make it feel so good are because they’ve gone across the world studying the great streets and digested all the dimensions and aspects and elements that make great streets,” Mann said.

With the designer selected, the next step was acquiring the property to execute their vision and finding financial backing. Mann and Alpert eventually decided on the Park Place site.

The only trouble was that the Marnad Corp., the entity formed by the Douthat family interests, wasn’t willing to sell — at first.

“We went to the broker who represented the owner and gave him our idea,” Alpert said. “His comment was the owner wasn’t interested because he’d just gone through this long, protracted zoning process and he would not have the patience to have the property rezoned again.”

But a second chance came along.

Mann and Alpert were asked if they’d like to be consultants on developing a mixed-use project at the site. After a while, they were invited to take over the deal.

Now it was time to find the money to pull it off.

“It was much too large, much too expensive for us to do with our resources,” Alpert said. “We put together an investment package and we took it to, really, two people. One of those people was the representative of Cecil Van Tuyl.”

Mann and Alpert’s company, Park Place Partners, joined a new entity called Park Place Developers that included Van Tuyl’s group. It was a match that not only helped them get the project started, but sustained it when the recession hit and conventional financing dried up.

Building a mixed-use project, regardless of its design, has an additional hurdle when it comes to finding tenants. Retailers are often OK with signing on for new space sight unseen, but businesses looking for offices want something tangible to walk through before making a deal.

“That became an incredible challenge,” Alpert said.

The support of the Van Tuyl-related trust was critical. In order to obtain bank financing to start construction on the first phase, he guaranteed a percentage of the leasing.

Later, when the recession hit and the equity needed to obtain a loan for construction doubled from 25 percent to 50 percent, the backing of the Van Tuyl trust came in very handy again. Mann and Alpert could pursue office deals where competitors had problems because of the stricter lending requirements.

Attempts to reach Van Tuyl or his representative for comment for this article were unsuccessful.

Park Place’s success in the hotly competitive retail scene in southern Johnson County also hinged on the outcome of what was a battle for primacy in the first half of the last decade between the 119th Street retail corridor and its rival along 135th Street.

On 135th, an Omaha, Neb., developer was pursuing a big shopping center at the corner of Metcalf Avenue called Corbin Park. Not far away, developer Fred Merrill was pursuing his Prairiefire development, and the Cornerstone project was taking hold as well.

The 119th Street corridor had Town Center and Hawthorne Plaza, and the new One Nineteen retail project near Roe was being pursued by RED Development.

“It was very confusing to the retail market,” Alpert said.

The big tie-breaker occurred in 2005 when Crate & Barrel, a prized destination store, decided to go to One Nineteen.

“Crate & Barrel’s decision to land within this district, even though it wasn’t Park Place, really said to people this is where it’s happening,” Alpert said.

The first retail tenant to sign on at Park Place was California Pizza Kitchen. Having a big national chain choosing it helped attract other tenants.

Still, the developers didn’t want Park Place to be known for well-known national franchises. Its much larger neighbor, Town Center, already had claimed many of them.

“We made a decision to follow the retail concept that I had been successful with at Hawthorne Plaza,” Alpert said, “and that’s more of a boutique-concept, more owner-operated, more local retailers, one-of-a-kind.”

J. Hathaway Shoe Boutique is one example. Owner Jill Hathaway had a store in Brookside and decided she wanted to open a shop in southern Johnson County.

“I had lots of offers from strip malls and shopping centers throughout Johnson County, and I chose here because of the ‘live here, shop here and dine here’ environment. It’s all-encompassing,” she said.

Hathaway likes Park Place’s European feel, with shoppers and office employees strolling the streets and visiting its smaller shops.

“Our sales are up 20 percent, and with the new businesses coming into Park Place, we’ll only see continued growth,” she said.

Judee Leichter, owner of nearby E.J.’s Boutique, agreed with Hathaway’s description. She moved her shop from the Corinth shopping center in northeast Johnson County.

“I just loved the ambience and the feeling you have,” Leichter said. “It’s more of a boutique area. You feel like you’re in a different city. I’m very happy, and my sales have increased.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise for Alpert and Mann has been the leasing success when it comes to offices.

The pair originally believed that Park Place, which was first mainly to be two- and three-level buildings with retail on the first floor and offices above, would be attractive to smaller professionals such as accountants and lawyers.

While those tenants have been found, it’s the bigger corporate users that have been a pleasant surprise.

Park Place has landed substantial companies, among them Tortoise Capital, a financial service firm that took 20,000 square feet. Ericsson, an international telecommunications company, took 14,000 square feet, and IBM nabbed 11,000 square feet.

And when the developer of the Lenexa City Center was unable to complete his project and declared bankruptcy, Generali USA Life Reassurance had the chance to leave its office building there and relocate to Park Place.

All of the office tenants have been willing to pay a premium to be at Park Place. Its rents for office space are from $29 to $32 per square foot, equivalent to the Country Club Plaza, which had been the metro’s priciest office space.

Kenneth Malvey, co-founder and managing director of Tortoise Capital, the first major office tenant at Park Place, said the atmosphere is ideal for attracting and keeping the caliber of employees it needs and entertaining clients.

“When we outgrew our space in Corporate Woods, we wanted office space that would make our people happy,” he said. “I quickly fell in love with the mixed-use, corporate neighborhood look and feel of this project.”

Having a chic Aloft hotel at Park Place for out-of-town clients to stay at and quality restaurants a few steps away also have been big pluses.

“There’s a ‘here’ here,” Malvey said. “It has a quaint, comfortable neighborhood feel that invites people to come out and experience that — and that’s why employees like it.

“You can look out the window in December and see holiday lights on Main Street and kids out skating on the rink. … To me, there’s nothing else in Johnson County that has the look, feel and convenience.”

Bob Cattanach, a real estate broker who’s brought four clients to Park Place totaling 70,000 square feet, said all are happy with the choice.

“It has a very attractive amenity package including a great hotel, shops and restaurants,” he said.

The biggest deal has been AMC’s decision to occupy a 130,000 square-foot building that’s expected to be completed in mid-2013. The movie-chain operator had been lured to the Kansas side of the area by a state incentive package valued at $47 million.

“They came to us, we didn’t solicit them,” Mann said. “They were trying to figure out where their options were.”

Besides the amenities at Park Place, the development also had the benefit of being close to the AMC Town Center 20 movie complex right across the street, and the assurance that its four-story building could be completed on schedule.

“Again, I think it goes pack to our equity partner and the fact they felt confident we had the ability to deliver and deliver on a tight time frame,” Alpert said.

The only aspect of the project that really hasn’t gone the way Mann and Alpert originally envisioned for Park Place was its housing component. When first conceived, the project was to have had a 52-unit, eight-story condominium building in its opening phase.

“The condo market tanked, and thank God we didn’t start the building,” Mann said. “We shelved the plan.”

Now, with the strong market for rental residential, Park Place has shifted gears and decided to go that route. The 177-unit first phase is expected to break ground this spring.

Once that’s completed and leased, the current thinking calls for another 150-unit rental development to complete the residential side of Park Place. At some point, the developers also anticipate a second hotel will be built.

As to where the name Park Place came from, look no further than the old Monopoly board game, something quite familiar to a pair of baby boomers like Mann and Alpert.

In fact, a poster-size version of the Park Place game card hangs on the wall of the leasing office.

“Picking the name is always the hardest part of any project,” Mann said. “We knew it was going to be green, have community spaces and lots of trees.”

The Monopoly connotation of Park Place is as the highest quality property, Alpert added. “Boardwalk didn’t make sense because we’re not on the ocean,” he said.

“Park Place was the other blue card.”