Walk down Swarthmore Avenue this week and the first thing you notice is how normal it feels. Families ordering iced coffee. A line outside a bakery. Someone's dog waiting patiently by a bench while its owner ducks into a shop. After nineteen months of scaffolding and silence, Palisades Village looks like it did before January 2025.
That's the surface read, and it's the one every outlet covered on reopening weekend. The part that matters more if you actually live here: roughly a third of what's inside those storefronts wasn't there before the fire. This isn't a restoration. It's a different Village wearing the same address, and knowing which parts are old friends and which are new arrivals changes how you plan your week.
What Came Back
The businesses that survived the closure and returned are the ones longtime residents will recognize immediately. Erewhon is open. So is Blue Ribbon Sushi, Porta Via, and Angelini Ristorante & Bar. Clothing brands Zimmermann and Veronica Beard are back on the retail side.
The more personal returns are the ones worth noting by name. Elyse Walker, whose original flagship burned in the fire, didn't just reopen a satellite location. She moved her full namesake store into the Village, making it one of the anchor tenants going forward. K Bakery owner Kim Kedeshian lost several locations around the Palisades in the fire and has rebuilt on a smaller footprint inside the Village, focused on a tighter menu that includes her chicken pot pies. Loomey's Toys, another Palisades-grown business that burned, relocated into the development rather than rebuilding its original storefront.
That distinction matters. These aren't chains treating the Village as one stop among many. They're local operators who lost their own buildings and chose this address as where they'd start again.
What Wasn't Here Before
The other third of the tenant roster has no history with the old Village at all. Chef Nancy Silverton opened Spacca Tutto, an Italian American steakhouse, as one of the debut restaurants. On the retail side, LESET, Violet Grey, and Xirena are new to the property entirely. A few blocks over on Sunset Boulevard, a new martial arts gym called Ludus opened its doors the same weekend, drawing curious foot traffic from people walking over from the ribbon cutting.
Here's the split, based on how developer Caruso has described the reopening mix:
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Returning | elysewalker, Erewhon, Zimmermann, Veronica Beard, Blue Ribbon Sushi, Porta Via, Angelini, K Bakery, Loomey's Toys |
| New to the property | Spacca Tutto, LESET, Violet Grey, Xirena |
The Village reopened 99 percent leased, according to Caruso CEO Corinne Verdery, with about one in three tenants new to the address. If your mental map of the Village is frozen at 2024, it's worth updating.
If You're Walking Over This Week
Not everything is open yet. About 70 percent of businesses opened their doors on reopening day, August 15, with the rest phasing in over the coming months. If you show up expecting every storefront lit and staffed, you'll find a few papered windows still waiting their turn.
One practical note: complimentary parking is available at Palisades Village through September 30. After that, expect the normal structure to resume. If you've been avoiding the area because you assumed parking would be a mess during the reopening rush, this window is the easier time to go.
The Calendar Is Filling Back In
Reopening a shopping center is one thing. Rebuilding the small rituals that made it feel like a neighborhood gathering spot again is a slower process, and the Village has started stacking a regular calendar on top of the storefronts:
- Mahjong Social — Mondays, 10 a.m. to noon
- Rummikub Social — first Tuesday of the month, 6 to 7:30 p.m.
- Pacific Palisades Farmers Market — Wednesdays, 1:30 to 5:30 p.m.
- Cars & Coffee — fourth Sunday of the month, starting at 8 a.m.
None of this is groundbreaking programming on its own. What's notable is that it's happening at all, on a schedule, in a place that was closed and gutted to the studs less than two years ago. For residents who used to build a Wednesday errand run around the farmers market or a Saturday morning around coffee and browsing, these are the details that signal the routine is actually reconstructable, not just symbolically restored for a ribbon-cutting photo.
"This allowed me to come back in a smaller way, but in a way that all of the things that are here are my best," Kedeshian said of reopening K Bakery inside the Village.
That's a fair summary of the whole property right now. Smaller in some ways, sharper in others, and still assembling itself in real time.
The Village Isn't the Finish Line
It's worth being honest about what this reopening does and doesn't represent. Caruso invested more than $100 million stripping the Village's buildings down to the studs, treating and testing the underlying materials, and rebuilding from scratch, according to reporting from KTLA. That's a real number and a real commitment. But Caruso himself was careful not to oversell it, telling reporters the reopening is "one megastep" in a recovery that has "many more mega-steps to come."
The obstacle he pointed to most often when asked what residents are still struggling with is insurance, not construction. A shopping center with a corporate landlord and outside capital can move at a different pace than an individual homeowner working through a claims process. The Village reopening is real, and it's a legitimate signal that foot traffic and daily life are returning to this stretch of Sunset Boulevard. It is not the same as saying the surrounding residential blocks are at the same point in their own timelines.
If you live in the Palisades, you already know this distinction better than any outside article can explain it. But it's the reason a shopping center reopening got a drone show, an 85-piece orchestra, and appearances from Anthony Hopkins and Kate Hudson rather than a quiet Tuesday morning ribbon cutting. The Village functions as a proof point for a community still working through a much longer process, one storefront and one homeowner at a time.
For now, the practical version of that story is simpler. Go get the chicken pot pie. Walk the loop of new storefronts next to the ones you remember. Bring a chair to Cars & Coffee at the end of the month. The neighborhood is rebuilding its rhythm in public, one Wednesday farmers market at a time, and that's worth showing up for regardless of what else is still unfinished a few blocks away.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in the Palisades, whether that's a property you're rebuilding, one you're considering listing, or a move you've been putting off until the neighborhood felt more like itself again, Barbra Stover has spent two decades working this coastline and is glad to talk through what you're seeing on the ground. Let's Connect.
