Walk through Biltmore Fashion Park on a Wednesday evening this month and you will pass a storefront with the lights off and paper taped inside the glass. Sixty feet away, a cluster of runners in reflective vests is stretching outside Life Time before a 6:30 p.m. group run. Neither group seems aware of the other, which is the entire story of what has happened to this property in 2026.
The dark storefront is Saks Fifth Avenue. The runners are Midweek Miles, a free weekly run hosted with the Phoenix Run Club that has become a standing Wednesday fixture at the center. One of these things is what most people driving past on Camelback Road will notice first. The other is what actually explains how the property is spending its year.
The Anchor That Went Quiet
Saks Fifth Avenue's exit from Biltmore Fashion Park was never a surprise by the time it happened, but it was still a milestone. The closure was announced in February 2026 as part of a wave of eight store closures tied to parent company Saks Global's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in January, and the Biltmore location, which had anchored the center since 1995, wound down operations by late April, laying off 67 employees in the process. Once the doors closed, Arizona no longer had a single Saks Fifth Avenue store anywhere in the state.
There's a piece of local history that makes this closure land differently for anyone who has shopped this center for a while. Saks has actually been part of Biltmore Fashion Park since it opened in 1963, when the original anchors were I. Magnin and Saks side by side. That first Saks location, built with stone walls native to the region, is the space Life Time now occupies. The store that just closed was Saks' second address at the property, the roughly 92,000-square-foot space it moved into in 1995 after Federated Department Stores retired the I. Magnin brand. So this isn't a retailer leaving the neighborhood. It's the end of a name that has been physically present at this intersection for 63 years, just never in the space people currently associate with it.
That kind of departure usually reads as decline. At most shopping centers, losing an anchor of that size and tenure triggers a visible slump: dimmer common areas, empty parking near the vacant end, a general sense that the property is coasting. That is not what has happened here.
What Moved In While Everyone Was Watching the Vacancy
While the Saks space sat empty, Biltmore Fashion Park absorbed one of its busiest tenant cycles in recent memory, and almost none of it was retail in the traditional department-store sense.
Herman Miller opened its first Arizona showroom at the center in late February, a 2,060-square-foot space next to Ralph Lauren built around the Aeron Chair and a design concierge program for local homeowners and designers. FP Movement and [solidcore] both signed leases the same month, targeting spring openings, with FP Movement taking a spot between Rye 51 and Warby Parker and [solidcore] planting a studio near Alo. Lululemon more than doubled its own footprint at the property, from 2,738 to 5,666 square feet. Alo Yoga and La La Land Kind Café, a Texas-based coffee concept making its Phoenix debut near True Food Kitchen, are both slated to open before the end of the year.
None of that compares in square footage to a single department store. But it compares in something else: how often a person has a reason to come back.
The clearest example sits just across Camelback Road at The Esplanade, technically a separate property but functionally part of the same evening routine for anyone who lives in the district. Camello, a Mexican restaurant and lounge from local hospitality group 151 Hospitality, opened February 2 with chef Julio Mata, a Guaymas native who came up at Barrio Café before opening every Barrio Queen location, running the kitchen. Camello is the third concept from the same team, joining Little Pickle Jewish Deli and The Mercer, a martini bar, both of which opened at The Esplanade in 2025. The three restaurants share owners and, increasingly, a customer base.
Rick Phillips and Peter Hearn, the founders of 151 Hospitality, framed the opening as part of a broader shift already underway along the corridor, pointing to Little Pickle and The Mercer next door and the surrounding social scene at Global Ambassador and Steak 44 as evidence the area was in the middle of what they called its "renaissance."
That's four venues in one thought, none of them inside Biltmore Fashion Park's own leasing footprint, all of them within a few minutes' walk of it. The corridor isn't leaning on one property to carry its evening traffic. It's distributing it across a small cluster of restaurants and bars that didn't exist, or existed under different names, two years ago.
Wednesdays Now Have a Standing Appointment
The retail wave gets the press coverage, but the recurring programming is what actually shapes a resident's week, and it has quietly become a full calendar rather than an occasional promotion.
- Wednesdays, 6:30 p.m.: Midweek Miles, a free community run with the Phoenix Run Club, open to all levels
- Fridays: Sip & Shop, where shoppers can buy a drink from participating tenants and carry it through the center while browsing
- Late winter: the Arizona WineGrowers Festival, which brought more than 40 Arizona wineries to the property this past March
- November: the property serves as the start and finish line for the 50th annual Phoenix Marathon, which includes the 10K, 5K, half, and full marathon distances
- Sometime this year: the invitation-only Art d'Core Gala returns to the property, after last year's Global Running Day drew nearly 1,000 participants in partnership with Lululemon and local run clubs
None of this existed as a fixed pattern a few years ago. A shopping center hosting a weekly free run club and functioning as marathon headquarters is a different kind of property than one whose identity rests on which department stores anchor its ends. It's also a different reason to show up. You don't go to a run club because a store is having a sale. You go because it's Wednesday.
What the Empty Storefront Actually Means Now
None of this means the Saks vacancy is irrelevant. A 92,000-square-foot dark space at a prominent corner has real consequences, and commercial leases at properties like this one often include co-tenancy clauses that let smaller tenants renegotiate rent or exit if a major anchor closes, which puts real pressure on ownership to fill the space with something substantial. RED Development, which took full ownership of the property in 2024 and has been running a multi-phase redevelopment plan that includes new landscaping, lighting, and gathering spaces, has not announced what replaces Saks.
But the timeline this year suggests the answer might matter less than it would have a decade ago. When a mall's identity depended entirely on which department stores anchored it, an empty Saks would have been the whole story. At a property that now runs a weekly run club, hosts a wine festival, anchors a citywide marathon, and sits two blocks from a restaurant group opening its third concept in under two years, the empty storefront is one storefront. It is not the pulse of the place anymore. The pulse moved to Wednesday nights and Friday afternoons, and it doesn't seem to be waiting on a new anchor tenant to keep going.
If you live in the Biltmore district, that's probably not news you needed a headline to tell you. You've already rerouted your evening walk around the construction fencing, already picked a side in the Camello versus True Food Kitchen debate, already noticed the run club growing by a few more people each week. What changed this year isn't the neighborhood's character. It's the shape of what fills it.
Craig Bennett and the team at Craig Bennett Group spend as much time walking these blocks as researching them, whether that's watching how a corridor like this one evolves or helping someone find the right address inside it. If you have questions about what's happening in Biltmore, Paradise Valley, or anywhere else across Metro Phoenix, reach out. We're always glad to talk shop, even when the topic is just what's new for dinner.
