This article deals with the existence of hypersurfaces minimizing general shape functionals under certain geometric constraints. We consider as admissible shapes orientable hypersurfaces satisfying a so-called reach condition, also known as the uniform ball property, which ensures $C^{1,1}$ regularity of the hypersurface. In this paper, we revisit and generalise the results of [9, 4, 5]. We provide a simpler framework and more concise proofs of some of the results contained in these references and extend them to a new class of problems involving PDEs. Indeed, by using the signed distance introduced by Delfour and Zolesio (see for instance [7]), we avoid the intensive and technical use of local maps, as was the case in the above references. Our approach, originally developed to solve an existence problem in [12], can be easily extended to costs involving different mathematical objects associated with the domain, such as solutions of elliptic equations on the hypersurface.