When I first went to Richmond, Virginia 9 years ago, my daughter and I called a taxi and asked him to take us to the absolute best shopping mall in Richmond. We were in the mood to shop and we didn’t care where that mall happened to be. He took us to Regency Square. Several folks we inquired to on the same thing came up with the same answer. Bah! This is nowhere close to Richmond’s best mall. It’s OK, but it ain’t all that.
Regency is on the corner of Parham and Quioccosin. A fairly uppity part of town. As such, I think Richmonders have long made the connection that since it was in the uppity part of town, it must be the best mall. Ha I say! Oh, it has some higher end merchants, but that isn’t always what you want.
This is a two-level mall, and appears bigger from the outside than it actually is. The parking can be a bit confusing as it was put in rather slip-shod. It’s really hard to tell where you are in the mall scheme of things, so I park at the Food Court entrance, which is buried down below and hard to find if you aren’t familiar with the layout.
Regency is a very clean shopping mall though. The management does take very good care of it. You won’t find any graffiti here or trash on the floor. Even the bathrooms are kept up pretty well.
As far as shopping, there really aren’t that many stores inside here. The two anchor stores are JC Penney and Sears. Nothing special there. I will point out that the prices are higher at these two stores than they are at their other malls in town. How rank is that? Boo Hiss. You really expect places like Penney’s to have uniform prices at every location. I was kinda teed off to find one night that a pair of shoes I wanted were a full 10 bucks higher at Regency’s location than at Chesterfield Towne Centre. That’s just crap. Luckily, the sales lady did us right by that since we had come there due to Chesterfield not having the correct size.
Other stores you will find here are Bombay, Victoria’s Secret, Spencer’s Gifts, Ann Taylor, The Gap, Williams Sonoma, Sea Dream Leather, Sonya’s Handbags, several jewelry stores & Wireless joints, Nine West, Motherhood Maternity, Lane Bryant, The Limited, Guess, Hechts (divided into two locations here), Express, Eddie Bower… and the only reason I ever go to Regency anymore: Crabtree & Evelyns.
Nothing really special here at all. A few over-priced places and the usual stores you find at any ol’ mall, only less of them.
The food court is not too bad though. It is, I will say, cleaner than the majority of food courts throughout America. They do a great job keeping on top of everything. As far as choices go though, same ol’ same ol’ really… Chick-fil-A, Arby’s, ChinaMax, Subway, Pretzels, Pizza places.. they do have a Flamer’s though and I really like their burgers. They make them fresh to order and man are they big and juicy.
The main restaurant here is Applebees and we all know what that’s like.. heh. Oh ok I’ll admit to liking Applebees once in awhile, but it is after all just another chain restaurant with nothing really remarkable. This one is in the middle upstairs by the only ATM machine in the whole Mall.
Well, now the days of folks thinking this is the best shopping mall around are finally over. With the opening of the huge and even more uppity Short Pump Town Center, The folks at Regency retaliated and put up the big bucks to open Stony Point Fashion Center down the road a bit… which is more uppity still. heh. So, the throngs are dwindling at Regency Mall now, and they’ve even rented a space to *gasp* Dollar Tree. The end is nigh!
Seriously. There are better stores in town now with the two new malls for the upper-end clientele, the Bombay loyalists have a bigger store at Willow Lawn, and the normal down-home folks like me never really shopped here to begin with, preferring Chesterfield Towne Center. I predict the end of Regency Mall once all the leases run out. Seriously… but I think they realize it too.
So, if in Richmond, go ahead and skip this one, no matter what some misguided folks will tell you. It ain’t the biggest, it ain’t the best. Not even close.
1420 Parham Road
Richmond, VA 23229
(804) 740-7467
