Every Monday evening in September, mats unrolled across the turf at RUNWAY Playa Vista for a free, 50-minute yoga class that started at 6:30 pm. Registration was required, mats were bring-your-own, and the instructors came from Livwell Playa, a yoga studio that does not yet have a storefront anyone can walk into. The classes happened. The studio, as a physical place, does not yet exist. That detail says more about how business actually lands in Playa Vista this fall than any single grand opening could.
Two Timelines, Same Plaza
The Sunset Yoga series was free, open to all levels, and ran weekly through September on RUNWAY's lawn.
A few doors down, in spirit if not yet in space, sits the opposite case. Seabutter, a sushi restaurant with existing locations in Beverly Hills, Glendale, Laguna Beach, and Westlake Village, has had plywood and signage up at RUNWAY since April 2026, marking what will be its fifth Southern California location. Public filings describe a buildout of roughly 47 indoor seats and 16 outdoor seats. Coverage through May and into August kept repeating the same phrase: arriving in the coming weeks. As of the most recent directory listing, RUNWAY still flags the space as Seabutter, coming soon. No opening date has been announced yet, so the space is one to watch rather than one to plan a dinner around.
Neither business is doing anything wrong. Livwell Playa is offering programming before it has a storefront. Seabutter's space remains listed as coming soon. But the two timelines sitting on the same block mean a resident can't assume anything about a business's presence just from whether the storefront looks finished. Some things are open before they're built. Some things are built and still not open.
What Doesn't Wait for a Ribbon Cutting
The one piece of RUNWAY's calendar that hasn't needed either kind of runway is Playa Vista Nights, the Wednesday open-air market that has run every week since it kicked off its 2026 season on March 11. Seasonal produce, artisanal goods, local vendors, and live music from 4 to 8 pm, with no opening weekend and no soft launch. It just started running and kept running, which by late September means the vendors have been at it long enough to know their regulars.
Hispanic Heritage Month programming folds into that same rhythm without needing its own storefront either. Observed nationally from September 15 through October 15, the monthlong recognition is built into RUNWAY's fall calendar alongside the market and the yoga series, another piece of the plaza's programming that doesn't depend on whether any particular tenant has finished its buildout.
A One-Year Anniversary Already on the Calendar
P.V. House, the sports lounge and restaurant at 12751 Millennium Drive, is marking its first year with an anniversary event on the RUNWAY turf this fall. The business was formed in February 2025 by longtime hospitality operator Chris Sessa, whose résumé includes Gladstone's, Paradise Cove Beach Café, and French 75, alongside his nephew Frank Agnone, an executive producer on South Park. In roughly a year and a half, P.V. House went from an LLC filing to having its own turf event on RUNWAY's calendar next to the Wednesday market and the seasonal programming.
P.V. House opened its doors and built its place in the neighborhood in real time, through game days, trivia nights, and a catering business. The anniversary marks a year of that neighborhood activity.
The Fixture Older Than Half the Storefronts
None of this year's arrivals, on either timeline, predates the Playa Vista Monster Dash 5K. The Halloween-themed fun run returns for its 8th annual running on Sunday, October 25, 2026, at Randy Johnson Park's Bluff Creek Fields, with race day starting at 9:30 am after packet pickup from 8:00 to 9:15. The route loops Bluff Creek Drive between McConnell Avenue and Village Drive, flat enough for strollers, costumed enough that showing up in character is part of the tradition.
Eight years puts the Monster Dash's first running in 2019, which means it predates P.V. House, predates Seabutter's signage, and predates Livwell Playa's yoga series by a wide margin. Storefronts at RUNWAY have opened, closed, and sat half-finished across those eight years. The race hasn't needed any of them to keep happening every October.
For anyone looking back at September and mapping out the next month in the neighborhood, the practical rundown looks like this:
- Playa Vista Nights, Wednesdays, 4 to 8 pm, RUNWAY's open-air market, running weekly since March 11
- Sunset Yoga with Livwell Playa, ran Mondays through September, 6:30 pm, free with registration, bring your own mat
- Hispanic Heritage Month programming, September 15 through October 15, folded into RUNWAY's fall calendar
- Playa Vista Monster Dash 5K, 8th annual, Sunday, October 25, registration opens 8:00 am, race starts 9:30 am, Bluff Creek Drive
What ties all of it together is that the plaza's actual rhythm, the market, the yoga, the race, keeps running regardless of which storefronts are lit up on a given week. Some businesses show up early with a class and no address. Others remain listed as coming soon, with no opening date announced. The neighborhood's own calendar doesn't wait on either one.
If you've been watching the Seabutter signage as long as the rest of the neighborhood has, you already know how this works. I keep a close eye on what actually opens, what stalls, and what's been quietly running the whole time at RUNWAY and across Playa Vista. If you ever want to talk through what any of it means for a property you own or are watching in the neighborhood, Barbra Stover is a good person to call.
