"Ghost town" was the phrase that showed up in Nextdoor posts this spring. The Ark reported in March that residents were pointing to a run of departures and "for lease" signs at Strawberry Village. Bella boutique had left earlier in the year. Woodlands Pet Food & Treats and Spanish Table had left in 2025, and Pizza Antica in 2023. In the same story, Edens, the Washington, D.C.-based owner that bought the center in 2022, said the property was performing well and that seven new businesses would open there that year.
Seven months later, most of those businesses have opened. They are mainly businesses with fixed daily hours: breakfast, workout classes, after-school snacks and dinner. The center's day now starts at a 6 a.m. Pilates class and ends when the taco counter closes at 9 p.m. Strawberry Village used to be a place to grab groceries and go. Now its hours look a lot more like a downtown's.
Spring Came Late, Then All at Once
In March, Alexander Ragonese, Edens' senior vice president of investment and development, told The Ark that Tartine and Cholita Linda were on track for a spring opening. He said Hydration Room, Club Pilates and Lulu Dae's would also open in the spring, and that two more unnamed tenants were signed, one in wellness and one in interior design. None of them opened in the spring. Here is when they actually arrived:
- Hydration Room opened June 12.
- Club Pilates announced it was open on July 21 in Suite 805 and held a grand-opening weekend August 7 through 9, as reported by the Southern Marin Ledger.
- Cholita Linda opened in mid-August in Suite 801.
- Tartine opened August 19 in Suite 125, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
- Ernesta, a custom-rug showroom, announced its opening on October 7 in Suite 703.
- Lulu Dae's was open by the time the Marin Independent Journal covered it on October 13.
Ernesta fits the interior-design slot Edens hadn't named in March. Tartine's delay goes back further than this year. The Mill Valley Chamber of Commerce noted in January that the 3,000-square-foot bakery was first announced with a 2025 opening, and then pushed to spring 2026.
The Day Now Runs From a 6 a.m. Class to a 9 p.m. Dinner
Line the posted hours up and you get one continuous day:
- 6 a.m. Club Pilates opens this early on Fridays. Its hours change by day, running as late as 8 p.m. on Mondays and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekends.
- 8 a.m. Tartine opens daily and stays open until 4 p.m. The bread is baked in San Francisco. Pastries, cakes and savory dishes are made on-site. The space seats 120 between indoor and outdoor tables.
- 9 a.m. Lulu Dae's opens daily and serves acai bowls, smoothies, poke, Spam musubi, bone broth and soft serve until 7 p.m. It has four tables inside and a pickup window for online orders.
- 10 a.m. Ernesta opens Monday through Saturday until 6 p.m., and on Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- 11 a.m. Cholita Linda opens daily and serves until 9 p.m. It sits directly across the roadway from Tartine, with about 70 seats indoors and more tables outside.
Club Pilates is only one of the fitness tenants. The Southern Marin Ledger counts five boutique studios at the center now: Club Pilates, Pure Barre, Orangetheory Fitness, StretchLab and Hot Yoga Republic, which is next door to Club Pilates in Suite 803. Three of the five, Club Pilates, Pure Barre and StretchLab, are franchise brands owned by Xponential Fitness, an Irvine-based company. Five studios with staggered class times give the parking lot a steady flow of visitors from early morning on, which a camera shop or a boutique never did.
Tuesdays add one more draw. A weekly farmers market runs there with Marin Community Farmers Markets from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. When it launched in 2023, Edens set it up in the parking lot between West Elm and Starbucks. The Marin Community Farmers Markets page for the market lists it as "Year Round" and also says it runs from June through November, so check before you count on December Tuesdays.
Cholita Linda's owners said this kind of foot traffic is what brought them to the center. Speaking to the Marin Independent Journal about choosing Strawberry Village for their first Marin location, co-owner Vanessa Chavez said the couple loved the area and its markets, and added:
"From our experience, it's a community that values good food, and there are lots of small businesses that do things really well."
That is the restaurant's sixth location. It grew out of a stall at Oakland's Jack London Square farmers market that Chavez and Murat Sozeri started in 2008.
Tartine Came Home to Strawberry, Not to Downtown
Tartine's return is the opening with the deepest local roots. It also shows how much of the center's pull now comes from places that used to cluster downtown. Chad Robertson and Elisabeth Prueitt started Bay Village Bakery in Point Reyes Station in 1995 and moved it to downtown Mill Valley in 1999. They closed it in early 2002 and went on to open the original Tartine in San Francisco's Mission District. Today there are three Tartine cafes in San Francisco, with a fourth coming downtown in 2027, plus seven in the Los Angeles area and six in Seoul.
Downtown Mill Valley already has plenty of bakeries. The Chamber's list includes Karen Fong's Mill Valley Baking Co. at 17 East Blithedale, Le Marais Bakery on Blithedale, Madrona Bakery at 17 Madrona, open since October 2023, and Stacey Waldspurger's Waldscraft Artisan Bakery at 31 Sunnyside. Tartine chose the other end of town, a 3,000-square-foot space in a shopping center that has been there since 1964 and is anchored by a Safeway. For Strawberry, Tam Junction and the Tiburon Boulevard side of Mill Valley, the best-known name in Bay Area baking is now a stop on the way to Safeway rather than a trip downtown.
The newest food opening has the strongest Strawberry connection. Lulu Dae's co-founder Duncan Ley is a Mill Valley resident who opened the shop near his home in Strawberry with business partners Lucia Camarda and Reza Morvari. Morvari co-owns San Francisco's Bowl'd Acai. The shop is in the space that was Woody's Yogurt Place for more than two decades until January 2020, and later Noble Cow Creamery. A San Francisco artist is painting a mural there of Mount Tamalpais, poppies and the Grateful Dead.
What the Remaining Empty Spaces Show
The turnover over the past few years has also sharpened a debate about who can afford to lease space here. In March, The Ark reported that several current and former tenants said rents had gone up significantly since Edens took over. Woodlands Pet Food & Treats moved to The Cove shopping center, and its owner told the paper the move was driven by finances and by Edens' request to vacate for Barry's Bootcamp, a Los Angeles-based fitness chain. Edens' answer was that the center is performing well and new tenants are on the way.
The Ark's numbers show how much space is still open. Strawberry Village has 55 leasable spaces, and five were vacant in March. Once the announced openings were done, three would still be empty: the former Pizza Antica, Spanish Table and Mike's Camera spaces. Mike's Camera had been a tenant for five decades and closed in 2023 after lease negotiations failed. All three were places you stopped into when you had an errand: a pizza restaurant, a specialty food and wine shop, a camera store. None of them were built around a daily class schedule or a morning coffee habit, which is what most of the new tenants depend on.
Edens' own listings for the center follow the same mix:
- Barry's Bootcamp appears on Edens' tenant directory as space 475, in the spot Woodlands left.
- Baan Thai Reserve is listed as coming in 2027.
- Marin Motor Social, a car meetup, is advertised for the second Saturday of each month from 8 to 9:30 a.m. on Edens' Strawberry Village page.
In a September 2025 release, Edens said its renovation of the center the previous year added new lighting, landscaping, seating, public art, signage, a reworked plaza and green space. Since then, the plaza has filled in with tables outside Tartine, Cholita Linda and Lulu Dae's, and a sixth fitness brand has been named for a corner that used to sell pet food.
If you live near Strawberry and want to know what a shopping center's comeback means for the homes around it, Nick Svenson tracks those changes block by block. Schedule a 15-minute consultation and we can talk through what the new Strawberry Village means for your street.
