"It has been our pride and pleasure to serve the Calabasas community," the Regency Calabasas Commons theater wrote in a farewell post before going dark for good on Sunday, December 28, 2025. Seven months later, on August 2, 2026, Marmalade Cafe served its last meal a few hundred feet away, closing out a run that started the same year The Commons itself opened. Somewhere in between, Jeni's Ice Cream packed up too. If you treat The Commons as an extension of your living room the way most Calabasas residents do, that string of goodbyes probably felt less like nostalgia and more like a pattern you couldn't quite name.
Here is the pattern. None of those closures are random. Each one lines up with a construction schedule Caruso Affiliated has published on its own site, and that schedule runs through the fall of 2027. Once you line the dates up, the last year at The Commons stops looking like decline and starts looking like a renovation you happen to be living through.
What's Actually Gone
The theater was the biggest loss and the easiest to explain. It opened in 1998 as the Edwards Grand Palace Stadium 6, one of the most expensive theaters per screen Edwards ever built, according to KTLA, which cited reporting from the local paper The Acorn. It changed hands through Regal, closed briefly during Cineworld's 2022 bankruptcy, then reopened as Regency Calabasas Commons with recliner seating for just under three years before shutting for good in December 2025. That closure made Calabasas the third city nearby to lose its only theater, after Agoura Hills and Westlake Village, and left no operating movie theater between Thousand Oaks and Woodland Hills.
Marmalade Cafe's exit is a smaller headline but a longer relationship. The cafe had operated at The Commons since 1998, the same year the center opened, and its other locations in Westlake Village, Malibu, Sherman Oaks, and El Segundo are staying open, according to Conejo Valley Guide. Jeni's Ice Cream closed its scoop shop around the same stretch. Three storefronts, three different businesses, one calendar year.
Built to Read Like a Hill Town
Part of why this feels bigger than a typical retail shuffle is the design itself. The Commons opened in 1998 as an open-air complex meant to evoke a hill town in Italy's Umbria region rather than a standard mall, built by Caruso Affiliated into the natural slope of the property, according to Wikipedia's entry on the center. The fountains, the stonework, the sightlines up the hillside were never incidental. They were the whole point.
That matters because the new phase, rebranded Commons Lane, is being built to extend that same vocabulary rather than replace it. Wider walkways and new planted green space are part of the plan for the west side, the same portion of the property where the theater used to stand. Whether the finished result reads as continuous with the original design is something only the finished product will answer, but the stated intent is an extension, not a different look bolted onto an old one.
The Order Was Never Random
The theater sat on the exact portion of the property the redevelopment needs first. Caruso's plan adds roughly 80 apartment homes and about 27,000 square feet of new shops and restaurants to that west side, and the housing goes up where the theater used to be. Demolishing it was not a symptom of the center struggling. It was the first physical step in a plan the city had already reviewed.
Marmalade's timing tracks the same document. The Commons lists its current construction phase as July through September 2026, the exact window in which Marmalade served its last plate, according to the property's own construction FAQ. Whether the lease decision and the build schedule were directly connected is not something the company has said publicly, but the overlap is hard to miss if you've watched the fencing move down the row.
The Timeline, In Order
- December 28, 2025: Regency Calabasas Commons theater closes for good.
- Early 2026: Demolition and construction begin on the west side of the property.
- July through September 2026: Active construction on new shops, restaurants, and the parking structure for the incoming apartments.
- August 2, 2026: Marmalade Cafe closes after nearly three decades at The Commons.
- Fall 2027: Full completion targeted, including the new apartments and 12 to 14 new shops and restaurants.
What Construction Looks Like This Month
If you're walking past The Commons right now, here is what you're seeing. Per the property's own FAQ, crews are actively building the new shops and restaurants and turning some spaces over to incoming tenants for build-out. At the same time, work is underway on the parking structure that will serve the new apartment homes. Both efforts are happening in the window you're reading this in, not sometime down the road.
The property has said the rest of The Commons stays open through every phase, meaning your regular loop through the shops doesn't need to change just because a fenced-off corner does. Most of the center, aside from that western strip, isn't part of the construction footprint at all.
What Arrives By Fall 2027
The finished project adds those 12 to 14 new shops and restaurants alongside the apartments, plus wider paseos and a stretch of planted green space designed for the kind of lingering the current layout doesn't really invite. For a center with roughly 40 existing tenants, adding more than a dozen new ones on a single strip is a meaningful shift in what a Saturday at The Commons can look like once the fencing comes down.
None of that changes what The Commons has been since 1998. The new construction is meant to sit alongside that original design, not erase it.
What Hasn't Moved An Inch
Barnes & Noble, See's Candies, and Lululemon are still exactly where they've always been. Sugarfish still requires patience or a reservation on weekend nights. Kings Fish House is still the reliable answer when a group can't agree on cuisine. None of the announced changes touch these tenants, and none of the public plans suggest they will.
Your other Calabasas weekend habit is untouched too. The Old Town Calabasas Farmers Market runs every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, on Calabasas Road across from Sagebrush Cantina. It's a separate address and a separate organization from The Commons, and nothing in the current construction affects it.
The next time a familiar storefront at The Commons goes dark, you'll already know the two questions worth asking. Is it on the west side of the property, and does the date fall inside a construction window the company has already published? Most of the time, the answer explains everything the goodbye post doesn't. Sherry Robbin has watched Calabasas take shape for decades, from the houses on its hillsides to the shopping center at its center, and she's always glad to talk through what a local landmark's next chapter might mean for the neighborhood around it. Let's Connect.
