What's New at Plaza del Lago, and What Never Left
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Walk into Plaza del Lago today and buy a rotisserie chicken at Jewel-Osco, and the trip feels exactly like it did before the renovation started. Walk twenty feet in the other direction toward what used to be Yellow Bird Stationery, and you're standing in front of a boutique that had never opened a Chicagoland location until this project brought it here. That's the real story of the renovation, now just over four years in: it isn't one transformation, it's two. One layer of the plaza has stayed almost perfectly still. The other has been almost entirely replaced.
For a shopping center that's spent four years under scaffolding, permit reviews, and staggered lease announcements, that split matters more than any single storefront. It's the reason a longtime Wilmette resident can walk through Plaza del Lago and feel two contradictory things at once: nothing has changed, and everything has.
Before WS Development bought the property in June 2022, Plaza del Lago spanned roughly 100,000 square feet across seven buildings with more than 30 retail units, anchored by a Jewel-Osco and a Starbucks. That baseline is worth holding onto, because it's the same anchor lineup the Village of Wilmette confirms is staying put through the entire re-tenanting process: Jewel-Osco, CVS, Starbucks, and Convito Café & Market all remain, untouched by the wave of new leases moving through the property.
That's not an accident of scheduling. It reads as a deliberate decision to leave the daily-errand backbone alone while everything built around it gets swapped out. If your Wilmette week includes a coffee run, a prescription pickup, or a grocery stop, your route through the plaza hasn't moved in years, even as the storefronts flanking it have turned over almost completely.
The specialty layer is where the real churn happened. Yellow Bird Stationery, Hanig's Footwear, Chantilly Lace, and Giggles and Giraffes moved out to downtown Wilmette storefronts. Rosati's Pizza closed its plaza location. Char Crews closed entirely. Clucker's Charcoal Chicken relocated to Highwood. These were the small, independent shops that gave Plaza del Lago its neighborhood-market feel for decades, and none of them are still on Sheridan Road.
In their place, a different kind of retailer has moved in, and the names skew toward first-time-in-Chicagoland arrivals rather than local operators. Confirmed open as of this writing:
Three of those ten, LoveShackFancy, Hill House Home, and James Perse, opened their first Chicagoland locations at this address. That's a different retail identity than the plaza has ever had. It's no longer a stop for stationery and shoe repairs. It's a stop for brands that otherwise require a trip downtown to Oak Street or the Mag Mile.
Two additions matter more than the rest for how residents actually use the plaza day to day.
The Henry opened on Wednesday, June 3, at 1515 Sheridan Road, serving coffee and pastries from early morning through a full dinner and late-night bar service. The Record North Shore called it a rare full-service restaurant for the plaza, and that's the practical shift worth noting. For years, Plaza del Lago had grocery, coffee, and grab-and-go, but no sit-down spot that covered a full day. The Henry closes that gap with a menu built around breakfast sandwiches, a Harvest Bowl, and short rib potstickers, plus a wraparound patio.
Johnnie-O followed on Saturday, August 1, with a grand opening celebration approved by the Village Board just days earlier. It's the golf apparel brand's first standalone store in the Midwest, and it took over the storefront next to Starbucks that most recently housed Stride Indoor Running Studio, in a stretch of the plaza that's also seen Just Food For Dogs and StretchLab reshuffle into smaller footprints nearby.
Between those two, a resident's Saturday loop through the plaza now includes an actual sit-down breakfast option and a men's apparel stop that didn't exist a month ago.
The two names that will change the plaza's profile the most haven't opened yet. Hermès has signed for an 8,000-square-foot, two-story anchor boutique in the plaza's main building. Oscar de la Renta is set to debut its first Midwest location at the plaza as well. As of late July, both were still described as scheduled rather than open, alongside Peter Millar, La Vie Style House, Cynthia Rowley, Studs, and Lilly Pulitzer.
WS Development has now signed 21 leases for new retail and restaurant space at Plaza del Lago, up from the 13 businesses first announced when the re-tenanting plan went public in mid-2025. The number kept growing as the project moved forward, which tells you the renovation isn't winding down. If anything, the pace is accelerating as more space becomes available and more brands want in.
Plaza del Lago has done this before. The property opened in the late 1920s as Spanish Court, built during the Jazz Age on a stretch of unincorporated land known informally as No Man's Land, before Wilmette annexed the area and the plaza settled into its long run as a neighborhood shopping center. By most accounts it's the second-oldest open-air shopping center still operating in the country. A hundred years of that history means the tenant mix has changed many times over. What's stayed constant is the physical shell and the sense that this particular corner of Sheridan Road is where Wilmette gathers, whether that meant a 1920s dance hall or a 2026 Hermès boutique.
The same pattern is playing out a mile inland, where Small Cheval, a spinoff of Chicago's Au Cheval, took over the former Depot Nuevo space on Wilmette Avenue. It's a separate project from the plaza, but it points to the same dynamic: Wilmette's commercial core is absorbing a wave of higher-profile retail and dining names while its everyday infrastructure, the grocery runs and coffee stops, stays exactly where residents left it.
For anyone who's watched this stretch of the North Shore for a while, that's the detail worth carrying forward. The plaza isn't becoming a different place. It's becoming a place where the errands you've always run sit next to a retail mix you wouldn't have expected here four years ago.
If you're curious how these kinds of neighborhood shifts tend to ripple into home values and buyer interest along Sheridan Road and the rest of Wilmette, Jena Radnay has been tracking this corridor closely and is glad to talk through what it means for your particular block. Request a Private Consultation whenever you're ready to dig into the specifics.
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Jena Radnay, and the focus of her real estate business, is all about people. Radnay’s love for real estate, houses, marketing, and people have allowed her business to grow organically, albeit explosively, in large part from referrals from her extensive network of contacts and connections.
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