Drive down Commons Way on a Tuesday in July and you will see construction fencing where the movie theater used to be. Cross the street to the north side of the paseo and Superba Food + Bread is serving breakfast at 8 a.m., BLVD Steak is prepping for dinner, and Bacio Di Latte is scooping gelato that lasts about four minutes in this heat. The town center is being rebuilt around you while it stays open around you. That is the shape of a Calabasas summer in 2026.
If you have lived here through the last two decades you already know the Commons rhythm. What is different this year is that the schedule has become the story. So has the fact that the parts of Calabasas life that never lived at the Commons in the first place, meaning Old Town on Sunday morning and Calabasas Lake on Sunday evening, are quietly the strongest they have been in years.
The Commons, in the middle of its second act
Rick Caruso broke ground on the Commons renovation on February 3, 2026. The plan on paper adds roughly 27,000 square feet of new shops and restaurants on the north side of Commons Lane and 80 apartment homes on the south side where the theater sat until it closed at the end of 2025. According to reporting in The Acorn, builders have said some of the new stores and restaurants could open by the end of 2026, with the apartments coming online in 2027.
For a resident, the practical version of that timeline is simpler. Through this summer and fall, expect fencing, staged deliveries, and a rerouted walking path on the south side of the paseo. The north side, which is where most of the recent tenant additions have landed, keeps operating on a normal schedule.
Here is where the recent additions actually sit, and what condition they are in as of this summer:
| Tenant | Type | Status this summer |
|---|---|---|
| Superba Food + Bread | All-day café and bakery, 4799 Commons Way | Open, breakfast through dinner seven days a week |
| KazuNori | 24-seat hand roll counter | Open |
| BLVD Steak | Modern steakhouse, in the former CrossRoads space near King's Fish House | Open |
| Bacio Di Latte | Italian gelato, in the former Jenny's Ice Cream space | Open |
| Zimmermann | Australian womenswear | Open |
| Toscanova | Longtime Italian anchor | Open, reservations recommended on concert nights |
| Porta Via Calabasas | California bistro | Open, and worth noting the Pacific Palisades sister location is re-opening August 2026 |
None of that is speculative. All of it is walkable from the same fountain your kids have been climbing on since 2005.
The reason the timing matters is that most Calabasas residents have been treating the Commons as either a functioning town center or a construction zone, and it is genuinely both right now. If you avoid it entirely until 2027 you will miss the summer when the north side has the most new operators it has ever had at once. If you show up expecting the old Commons, the south-side fencing will feel like a bigger disruption than it actually is.
The Old Town Sunday market is the market people forget to mention
The Calabasas Certified Farmers Market at 23504 Calabasas Road runs every Sunday morning in the heart of Old Town. Free parking in the dirt lot, produce and prepared food and artisan goods, and, critically, a completely different tempo than anything at the Commons. It is where you actually run into your neighbors instead of watching them from across a valet stand.
Two things make the Old Town market matter more this summer than usual. The first is that with the Commons paseo partially fenced, the Sunday morning stroll that a lot of longtime residents used to fold into a Commons coffee run now has a natural home two miles west. The second is that Old Town Calabasas, the strip along Calabasas Road between Mulholland Drive and Park Granada, has been quietly holding onto its low-slung, pre-Caruso feel while everything east of it modernizes. If you have been meaning to reintroduce your kids or your out-of-town parents to the original Calabasas main street, this is the summer.
Bring a tote. The best stone fruit disappears by 10.
Sunday night belongs to the lake
The Sun Sets Summer Concert Series returns to Calabasas Lake on Sunday evenings at 6 p.m. It is free, it is on the water, and it is one of the few standing summer traditions in this city that does not require parking at a shopping center. The Conejo Valley Guide keeps a running list of the region's free concerts, and Calabasas Lake sits alongside the Warner Park series in Woodland Hills and the Constitution Park programming in Camarillo on that list. What that context tells you is that the lake concerts are not a scaled-down version of a bigger event happening somewhere else. They are the local anchor of a much wider regional summer.
A working way to use the calendar: farmers market at 9, home for a few hours out of the heat, then a picnic at the lake at 6. Two of the three best hours to be outside in Calabasas in July are bracketing that Sunday.
The Fourth of July, and the week that follows
The July 4 event on the Calabasas calendar this year is anchored to the national America250 celebration, hosted by Queen Latifah with performances by Chris Stapleton and The Smashing Pumpkins, with a drone show after the concert. Local Patch coverage listed the block-party village opening at 3 p.m. and the concert beginning at 6 p.m. Expect road closures near the venue, expect the Commons to be quieter than a normal Saturday because most residents will be at the block party, and expect the following weekend to feel more like a normal summer weekend than the one before it.
If you are hosting family in town for the holiday, the sequence that works is fireworks on the Fourth, farmers market on the Fifth, and either a lake concert or an early dinner at Superba on the Sixth. It uses all three of the Calabasas patterns without asking anyone to sit in traffic on the 101.
What the construction timeline actually means for someone who lives here
The temptation with a project on the Commons' scale is to read the renderings and start planning around 2027. That is a mistake this summer. Two practical points that only really surface if you live inside the schedule:
The apartment building on the south side is a real housing addition to a city that does not add much housing. Corinne Verdery, Caruso's chief executive, framed the apartments to The Acorn as a response to residents who wanted an option to stay in Calabasas through life transitions, including empty nesters moving out of a house and family members wanting to live nearby. Whether that framing holds up in practice depends on rents that have not been published yet. But for anyone who has watched a parent or an adult child move out of Calabasas because there was nothing between a single-family home and a commute, the 80 units are worth paying attention to.
The construction sequencing on the north side is where the near-term dining picture is decided. Every restaurant listed in the table above is on that side, and the paseo work is deliberately staged so the north-side storefronts keep customer access. If you have been assuming the Commons is closed, you have been giving your reservation slot to someone from Hidden Hills.
The through line
The story a lot of residents will tell about Calabasas this summer is that the Commons is under construction. That is true and it is also, on its own, the wrong story. The more accurate version is that the two places Calabasas gathers that do not depend on the Commons at all, Old Town on Sunday morning and the lake on Sunday evening, are quietly load-bearing right now, and the north side of the Commons has more open, current, worth-your-Friday-night operators than it has had in years. The construction fencing is the least interesting thing on the block.
The city has not paused. It has just spread out.
If you are thinking about how the next chapter of the Commons, the arrival of new apartment housing, or the ongoing shift in Old Town might change what your Calabasas home is worth, or what you should look for if you are moving into the area, the Brian Merrick Team has been reading this market for more than thirty years. Work With Brian.
