If you drove Calabasas Road this month, you saw two different versions of change happening half a mile apart. On one end, orange fencing wraps a construction zone where a movie theater used to sit. On the other, the same folding tables that have anchored Saturday mornings in Old Town for years are still setting up before 8 a.m., just with a new sushi counter two doors down that wasn't there last year.
Both are true stories about Calabasas right now. Neither one is the whole story. The mistake residents keep making is assuming the two are on the same timeline, that "the Commons is under construction" means "skip it this season" and "Old Town never changes" means "nothing new to see." Both assumptions are wrong, and knowing why changes how you actually plan a Saturday here through the rest of 2026.
What's Actually Happening at the Commons
Rick Caruso broke ground on a redevelopment of The Commons at Calabasas on February 3, 2026, on the site of the former Regency Cinema, which closed at the end of 2025. The project, which Caruso's team calls Commons Lane, adds 80 apartment homes and roughly 27,000 square feet of new shops and restaurants along a pedestrian paseo, all part of about 190,000 square feet of new construction on the west side of the property.
That sounds like a lot of disruption for a shopping center you visit for coffee and a haircut. It mostly isn't. According to the property's own construction updates, the center has stayed open through every phase, and the current stretch, July through September 2026, is focused on handing finished retail spaces over to new tenants for buildout rather than tearing up the parts of the center you actually walk through. The theater's gone. The rest of the arc of shops that's been there since 1998 hasn't moved.
Caruso's chief executive, Corinne Verdery, put it this way at the groundbreaking:
"For nearly 30 years, The Commons at Calabasas has been a place where the community comes together."
That's the framing the company is selling, and for once the construction schedule backs it up. The new residential building isn't expected to open until fall 2027. The retail portion is supposed to land first, sometime before the end of 2026, which means most of what changes at the Commons this year will show up as new storefronts, not new scaffolding.
Who's Already Moved In
Several of those storefronts are already open and worth knowing by name if you haven't been by recently:
- BLVD Steak, a modern steakhouse that replaced the longtime CrossRoads space near King's Fish House, serving prime cuts and cocktails with an emerald-and-gold dining room.
- KazuNori, the hand roll counter named for sushi chef Kazunori Nozawa, known for the cylindrical hand roll format he brought to the U.S. decades ago.
- Superba Food + Bread, a California brasserie with roots in Venice Beach, serving breakfast through dinner seven days a week out of an 1,800-square-foot space with a shaded patio.
- Bacio di Latte, an Italian gelato shop that took over the old Jenny's Ice Cream spot.
- Zimmermann, the Australian fashion label's boutique, joining the center's existing mix of higher-end retail.
There's also talk, not yet confirmed by the company, that Uovo could be next into the lineup. None of that is part of the Commons Lane construction itself. These are tenant swaps in the existing shopping arc, the kind of turnover that's been happening at the Commons for years, just landing in the same season as the bigger project next door.
A Half Mile Away, Nothing Broke Ground
Old Town Calabasas doesn't have a developer's press release attached to it, and that's sort of the point. The Saturday farmers market on Calabasas Road, just west of El Canon Avenue and across from the Sagebrush Cantina, still runs 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. with free parking in the same dirt lot it's used for years, produce stalls and prepared food side by side under the same open-air setup.
What's different is smaller and quieter. Yume Sushi Bar opened a second location in Old Town this year, adding a modern sushi option to a strip that already includes The Mulholland, known locally for its focaccia and cheese fondue, and 10 Speed Coffee, a pre-hike or post-market stop for regulars. None of this required a groundbreaking ceremony or a 190,000-square-foot construction footprint. It's one lease at a time, in a district built for exactly that kind of gradual turnover.
Two Kinds of Change, Side by Side
| The Commons | Old Town Calabasas | |
|---|---|---|
| What changed this year | Groundbreaking on 80 apartments, ~27,000 sq ft new retail | New sushi bar location, ongoing storefront turnover |
| Construction visible now | Yes, west side, through at least September 2026 | No |
| Anything closed to visitors | Former theater site only | Nothing |
| Parking | Same lots, some staging near west side | Free dirt lot, same as always |
| Full project timeline | Retail by late 2026, apartments fall 2027 | No fixed timeline, ongoing |
The pattern underneath both columns is worth sitting with. The Commons changes in five-year capital cycles, approved by a city council, announced at a groundbreaking, tracked on a construction FAQ page. Old Town changes one storefront lease at a time, with no announcement bigger than a new sign going up. Both are legitimate ways a commercial district evolves. Neither one is faster or slower in some absolute sense. They're just built on different clocks, and a resident who only checks one of them is only getting half the picture of what's actually new in Calabasas this year.
What That Means for Your Next Saturday
If you're planning a dinner out and want to try BLVD Steak or Superba, go to the Commons now. The construction is contained to the west side near where the theater used to stand, and the rest of the center, including the new tenants, is fully open and operating as usual. If you're doing the market run, Old Town hasn't skipped a Saturday, and now there's a second sushi option to add to the rotation afterward.
The thing to actually watch for, if you're the kind of resident who tracks this stuff, is the handoff coming later this year. The shopcommons.com construction page has said new tenants are taking possession of finished spaces through September, which means the next few months are when Commons Lane starts to look less like a construction zone and more like an actual addition to the property. That's the moment worth checking back in on, not because anything is urgent, but because it's the first real chance to see whether the finished paseo lives up to what's been promised since the city council approved the plan back in December 2023.
Calabasas isn't becoming a different place this year. It's running two renovation clocks at once, one measured in city permits and apartment units, the other measured in new restaurant signage and a Saturday market that's kept its hours since before either construction project existed. Knowing which clock you're checking is the difference between assuming the Commons is closed for business and actually knowing it's mostly open, new restaurants included.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values on either side of Calabasas Road, or you're simply trying to figure out where the next few years of neighborhood investment are headed, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks it block by block. The Agents can walk you through what these two projects mean for the neighborhoods around them. Talk with a Local Expert.
