Stand at the west end of Commons Lane on a Saturday afternoon and you'll see both stories at once. To your left, chain-link fencing wraps a job site where the Regency Cinema's marquee still lists a movie that stopped playing at the end of December. To your right, there's a line for hand rolls at KazuNori and gelato at Bacio di Latte, the kind of crowd that suggests something new just opened.
Both are true. Neither one explains the other.
The Commons at Calabasas is in the middle of Commons Lane, Rick Caruso's redevelopment of the shopping center he built in 1998. But the restaurants drawing lines right now aren't part of that project. They opened in space that was already there, doing what retail centers do between leases, while the actual construction next door moves on a much slower calendar. Confusing the two means either overestimating how close the new project is to finished, or missing that half of what feels new at The Commons has nothing to do with it at all.
What the City Actually Approved
Commons Lane isn't a rebrand. It's the name of an existing internal walkway at the shopping center, the one that used to lead to the movie theater. The redevelopment carries that name, too. According to The Acorn, the Calabasas City Council approved the plan unanimously at a special meeting on December 6, 2023, after roughly 30 residents spoke during public comment, most of them supportive, a few raising concerns about building height and density.
What got approved: five buildings across two sites, adding close to 211,000 square feet of new construction. New restaurants and shops are going up on one side of Commons Lane. On the other side, where the theater used to stand, crews are building 80 apartment homes. The tallest of the new buildings, the one replacing the theater, can reach 85 feet. The others, built on what used to be surface parking, are capped at 46 feet.
The council also had to solve a smaller, more specific problem: the project eliminates a loading area, a fire lane, and eight parking spaces behind the Calabasas Library, and the city negotiated compensation from Caruso to offset that loss. A separate $120,000 traffic mitigation fee is earmarked for signal upgrades on nearby roads, a detail Mayor Pro Tem Alicia Weintraub raised directly during the hearing. As The Acorn reported, her closing line on the project captured the room better than any press release could: "It is very evident that no matter how you feel about this project, everybody loves The Commons."
Groundbreaking happened on February 3, 2026, seven months before this was written. That's the timeline that gets covered when Commons Lane makes news. It is not the timeline responsible for what you're actually eating this month.
The New Restaurants Predate the Bulldozers
Here's the detail that gets lost: Superba Food + Bread, the California brasserie now serving breakfast through dinner at 4799 Commons Way, opened on March 28, a full ten months before Caruso ever broke ground on Commons Lane. It occupies a storefront in the original, untouched two-thirds of the center, the same 200,000-plus square feet that's been operating since 1998 and isn't part of the construction footprint at all.
The same logic applies to the other names generating buzz this year. KazuNori, BLVD Steak, Bacio di Latte, and the Zimmermann boutique are all trading inside the existing complex, not inside a building that broke ground in February. Five new structures don't get framed, roofed, and leased out overnight. If a storefront on the east side of the property has new signage lit up right now, that space was sitting empty or between tenants before Commons Lane existed, not created by it.
That distinction matters because it's easy to read a run of restaurant openings as proof a redevelopment is ahead of schedule. It isn't evidence of that at all. It's evidence that The Commons, like any center this size, has ordinary turnover happening at the same time as a much larger, much slower construction project a few hundred feet away. The two are running on separate clocks that happen to share a parking lot.
What Untouched Actually Means Here
| Open now, unaffected by construction | Under construction, still to come | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | North and south sections of the original 1998 center | West side, along Commons Lane, on the former theater and parking lot site |
| Anchors / tenants | Gelson's, Barnes & Noble, Sephora, Lululemon, plus the existing restaurant row | 12 to 14 new curated shops and restaurants, per Caruso's own leasing plan |
| Square footage | Roughly 200,000+ sq ft, standing since 1998 | About 27,000 sq ft of new retail and dining space |
| Recent additions | Superba Food + Bread, KazuNori, BLVD Steak, Bacio di Latte, Zimmermann | Not yet leased or open as of this writing |
| Residential | None | 80 new apartment homes replacing the demolished Regency Cinema |
| Target timing | Already operating | Some retail by late 2026; apartments in 2027 |
The math is worth sitting with. The new construction adds about 27,000 square feet to a center that already has more than seven times that much square footage sitting open and unaffected. Most of what you use at The Commons on a normal week, the grocery run, the bookstore, the dinner reservation, was never inside the construction perimeter to begin with.
What Comes Next, and When
Caruso's own leasing materials describe the finished project as 12 to 14 new shops and restaurants along a pedestrian paseo, plus a community green space designed for outdoor movies and gatherings on the footprint where the Regency's screen used to sit. At the February groundbreaking, builders said some of that new retail could open before the end of this year, with the apartment homes coming online in 2027.
Caruso CEO Corinne Verdery framed the project as continuity rather than reinvention when the shovels went in: The Commons, she said, has spent nearly 30 years as a place where the community comes together, and this next chapter is meant to extend that rather than replace it. Whatever comes out of the current construction zone, it's being built to sit alongside Gelson's and Barnes & Noble, not instead of them.
For anyone timing a visit around a specific new storefront, the more reliable source is the city's own project page at cityofcalabasas.com, which tracks Commons Lane's permitting and construction status directly, rather than word of mouth about what's supposedly opening soon.
Planning Around It Through the Rest of 2026
If you're headed to The Commons this fall, the practical read is simple. The fencing along Commons Lane marks an active job site, not a preview of what's already trading. Everything Superba, KazuNori, BLVD Steak, Bacio di Latte, and Zimmermann are doing right now is happening in space that predates the redevelopment entirely, and it will keep operating on its own schedule regardless of when the new buildings across the lane finish. The apartments, the paseo, and the dozen-plus new storefronts are still a 2026-into-2027 story, not a this-week one.
Calabasas has absorbed bigger changes to its town center before, and the ones worth watching here are the ones with actual dates attached to them: a groundbreaking seven months behind us, a retail opening window that starts before the year is out, and a residential delivery sometime in 2027. Everything else you're noticing at The Commons this season got there on its own.
If you're weighing what a changing commercial core means for a home nearby, or you're simply trying to understand how a neighborhood's center evolves over time, the DeWalt Meneses Group has spent years reading exactly these kinds of shifts across Los Angeles' most closely watched communities. Partner With Our Expert Team when you're ready to talk specifics.
