Drive down Commons Way this month and you'll see fencing where the Regency used to be, a one-way detour cutting through what used to be a two-way aisle, and a crew working on a parking structure that won't be finished for another year. It looks like a lot. It isn't. The theater closing and the west end going quiet accounts for maybe a quarter of what's changed at The Commons in 2026. The rest of the property, the part most people actually use on a Tuesday night, has barely moved.
That gap between how much construction you can see and how much daily life it actually touches is the story worth understanding if you live anywhere near Calabasas Road, Las Virgenes Road, or the stretch of the 101 that feeds into this part of the Valley.
What's actually fenced off
The Regency Calabasas theater closed for good on December 28, 2025. It had been the last movie theater standing in the corridor running from Thousand Oaks through Calabasas to Woodland Hills, after the Malibu Colony and Agoura Hills locations closed in the years before it. Property management's own explanation, posted to its construction FAQ, is that a multiplex is "no longer a sustainable use" given how people watch movies now. That's a leasing calculation, not a comment on the neighborhood.
The demolition cleared the way for what Caruso is calling Commons Lane: 80 apartment units and roughly 27,000 square feet of new shops and restaurants, built on the old theater footprint and the surface parking lot behind it. Ground broke in February 2026. The apartments won't open until Fall 2027. Some of the 12 to 14 new retail and restaurant spaces could open by the end of this year, though nothing has a confirmed date yet.
Here's what the construction phase actually costs you if you're running errands there this fall. A portion of the two-way drive aisle between the new buildings has been converted to one-way while crews work on the parking structure. Valet is still running Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., staged near Sugarfish by Sushi Nozawa and Polacheck's Jewelers, same as it's been for years. Gelson's hasn't moved. The library and civic center on the property's edge, the reason the city negotiated compensation for eight lost parking spaces behind it, are unaffected.
The tenants that showed up before anyone noticed
The detail that gets lost in the theater-closure headline is how much new business had already landed at The Commons before the fencing went up, and none of it is part of Commons Lane. KazuNori's hand roll counter, BLVD Steak, Bacio di Latte's gelato counter, and the Zimmermann boutique all opened in the original 1998 footprint, on the north and south ends near Gelson's, well before construction started on the west side. Superba Food + Bread opened there in March 2025, a full-service brasserie from the team behind the original Venice Beach location, serving breakfast through dinner seven days a week out of a space with 27-foot ceilings and a shaded patio built for a hundred guests.
None of these five have anything to do with the redevelopment underway now. They're evidence that the property was adding tenants at a healthy clip for more than a year before anyone started talking about a movie theater closing. If your mental model of The Commons is "under construction, wait it out," that model is wrong for at least three quarters of the property.
The one closure construction can actually take credit for
The exception is Marmalade Cafe, which closed after 28 years on the property. In a statement to followers, the company was direct about why: ongoing construction throughout the shopping center had caused what it called a devastating decline in business. That's the one loss you can trace straight to the fencing and detours, and it's worth sitting with, because it's a real cost to a business that had been part of The Commons since close to its 1998 opening.
It's also, so far, the only one. Everything else on the north and south ends, the part locals actually treat as their town square, is running the same as it always has.
Two blocks away, a different kind of opening
If you're waiting on Commons Lane's retail bays to fill in, you'd be missing what's already happening a short drive from the property gates. Jon & Vinny's opened its ninth location on July 29, 2026, at 23538 Calabasas Road, in the building that used to house Mulholland before that restaurant closed in October 2025. It's a bungalow-style build with a full bar, a heated back patio, and an attached Helen's wine shop, sitting directly across from Sagebrush Cantina and a short walk from the farmers market.
A few minutes away on Las Virgenes Road, Salsa & Beer Mexican Grill is finally serving food at 4895 Las Virgenes, the old Coco's Family Restaurant site. Owner Gabriel Huerta first put up signage there in 2020 and pulled building permits not long after, but the space sat empty through the pandemic and past it. New signage went up in June 2026, and current restaurant listings now show an active location with a posted closing time, suggesting the doors opened sometime over the summer without much announcement. Huerta already runs locations in Lake Balboa and North Hollywood built around the flavors of Jerez, Zacatecas.
Jon & Vinny's and Salsa & Beer are single-address restaurants, so they open on their own schedules. Commons Lane is a 190,000-square-foot mixed-use build that the city council approved in December 2023, and its shops and restaurants are planned to open ahead of the apartments, which are expected in Fall 2027. For now, the two Calabasas Road and Las Virgenes Road restaurants are the newest places to eat that are open.
What this actually means for your weekend
If your routine runs through The Commons on a normal week, here's the state of things as of this fall:
- Gelson's, KazuNori, BLVD Steak, Bacio di Latte, Superba Food + Bread, and the rest of the original north and south tenant rows are open and untouched by construction.
- Valet is running Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., staged near Sugarfish and Polacheck's Jewelers.
- Expect a one-way detour on part of the drive aisle between the new buildings while the parking structure goes up.
- Jon & Vinny's is open now at 23538 Calabasas Road, and Salsa & Beer appears to be serving at 4895 Las Virgenes Road, both outside The Commons.
- New retail and restaurant space inside Commons Lane could start opening by the end of 2026, but nothing has a confirmed date.
- The 80 apartment units and the new green space aren't expected until Fall 2027.
None of that changes how you'd order a coffee at Superba tomorrow morning. What it does is separate the part of the story that's actually disruptive right now, one closed theater, one lost cafe, a temporary detour, from the part that's still years out. The rest of the property is doing exactly what it was doing last year.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values on either side of Calabasas, or just want a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground rather than a headline, NewMarket Homes LA has been watching this stretch of the Valley for years and is happy to talk through it with you.
