Scotland’s biggest retail and leisure mall has Iberian owners – and a proud Scottish-Italian general manager
David Pierotti is the charismatic golf-loving custodian-in-chief of Scotland’s largest retail, food and leisure mall. He’s proud of how it looks and feels: from the quality of the shop frontages right through to the cleanliness of the baby changing areas and the public conveniences.
Silverburn opened in Glasgow in 2007 and is now owned by Eurofund Group, a Spanish investment company, which gives this bright mall a sense of ‘Glasgow meets the Bella Vida’. While Edinburgh’s premium retail offering, the St James Quarter, has given the capital a renewed sense of retail confidence, leading through to Harvey Nicols in St Andrew Square, Silverburn has been reviving its fortunes.
Pierotti takes The Business on a tour, admiring the Tag Heuer watches and the jewellery in the immaculate Chisholm Hunter store, passing the Dunkin’ Donut stall, and the Waterstones bookshop window where Nicola Sturgeon’s book, Frankly, is £4 off its £28 retail price.
He is General Manager of Silverburn, a workplace employing a combined 3,500 staff, including many who have not previously been in employment. It is more than one million square feet on a 25-acre site, the well-heeled Southside of Scotland’s largest city.
It now has 130 stores under its roof, and whopping non-domestic rates value for all the stores of more than £7m a year, including £3m for Tesco, £635,000 for M&S, and £447,500 for Next.
We’re going to have a record year and smash 16 million visitors
- David Pierotti
It’s the attention to detail and security of guests by Silverburn’s own 350 staff of this vast piece of Glasgow real estate which gives Pierotti a spring in his step. He has even been shortlisted for the Manager of the Year Large Venue in the SCEPTRES, the retail industry awards.
“It’s been remarkable. Our footfall is up by 8 per cent. We’re going to have a record year and smash 16 million visitors. The 23 new stores that we’ve opened have given us another 450 jobs in Glasgow. Our combined sales for the year are up 7 per cent, that’s like-for-like. Non like-for-like in the new stores, it is up 41 per cent.”
Pierotti is a youthful 59 years old, and from a Scottish-Italian family in Paisley. His parents came from Barga and he worked in the family fish and chip shop before starting his retail career with Burton the Tailor, becoming the youngest store manager in the UK, aged 17.
He went on to become a regional and national manager, working with the likes of Debenhams and BHS, before arriving at Silverburn when the front doors opened.
“We think Silverburn is on par with Edinburgh’s St James. We have similar aspirations for our mall – and we’ve a number of firsts with H Beauty in Glasgow, [a sub-brand of Harrods with multiple cosmetic and beauty brands in store]. Customers – or guests as we refer to them – see the point of difference between us and other Scottish shopping centres. It is the mall fit-out, the facilities and the ease of browsing and shopping,” he says.
In 2009, the centre was bought by Hammerson, a FTSE 100 company, and saw further investment from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The centre was extended in 2015 to include a restaurant court with the likes of Wagamama and Nando’s, and a 14-screen Cineworld cinema.
“We traded for 12 years and, in between, we’ve had to deal with the Covid pandemic. Post-Covid smart operators, like us, have diversified and realised the mall is not purely for fashion, but also for food, leisure, including the likes of King Pins Bowling, with an emphasis on having fun. We’ve recovered at pace. We’ve tried intentionally to move away from the large department store model, because it’s failing.”
He laughs when he reels off the retail cliches of ‘aspirational’ and ‘experiential’ but there is certainly a feeling that this is working well in Silverburn, with parking spots hard to find on this sunny afternoon even with more than 4,500 available spaces. A public transport hub is also a vital part of the centre with local and regional buses serving the mall.
Shortly before Christmas in 2021, Eurofund Group and Henderson Park bought the site for £140m. The Madrid-based investment firm, which has developed retail parks in Barcelona and Lisbon and mixed-use projects in Madrid, Costa del Sol, and Parma in Italy, was making its first foray into the UK.
“One of the first things they did was deal with the latent voids [empty shops] which were not encouraging for our guests. Our Debenhams went bust, which was the second biggest in Scotland. What were we going to do with that big lump of space?”
Alberto Esquevillas, Eurofund’s retail CEO for the UK, has been instrumental in working with the likes of Zara and Jack & Jones, the Danish menswear brand, enticing them to Silverburn. The Spanish connection has paid dividends with Silverburn the only site in Scotland with four Inditex brands, which are part of the massively popular Zara, the Arteixo-headquartered fast fashion company. As The Business visited, the hoardings for the Stradivarius store were coming down, joining the two other Inditex brands, Pull&Bear and Bershka.
Post-Covid smart operators, like us, have diversified and realised the mall is not purely for fashion
“In the last 18 months we’ve opened 23 stores, which is unheard of. But, more importantly, the aesthetic, how we look and the atmosphere in the mall has changed. We’ve reintroduced soft planting, break-out areas for people to work on the move, we’ve brought in new kids’ play areas.
“We’ve brought in a slate of new retail companies including Seasalt, Mango and a flagship Zara store [Scotland’s largest] in the former Debenhams space,” says David. “There is a genuine sense of place in Silverburn.”
Like many malls, anchor tenants which bookend a complex are important.
M&S, with a revitalised food hall, is at one end of this half a kilometre stretch, leading down past TK Maxx, and Zara’s Swedish rivals, H&M, towards the food court in the large airy wood-beamed hall, and the cinema complex.
Nestled beside this is one of Scotland’s largest Tescos, and waiting to open is Scotland’s only Harribo store: a sweet story for Scotland’s love of sugar.
“I opened Silverburn here in 2007 and I still love this place. It’s hard work but there is an amazing team, and while we take it very seriously to retain our standards, I also think we enjoy a laugh at work too.”
Read more of the Commercial Property Review featured in the Autumn 2025 issue of The Business magazine here.
