For close to two decades, the corner of The Lakes at 2150 E. Thousand Oaks Boulevard was where you went for a bottle of magnesium, a rotisserie chicken, and a produce run that took eleven minutes. Lassens Natural Food & Vitamins was the kind of anchor that didn't announce itself. It just quietly generated the daytime foot traffic that gave the fountain plaza a pulse before the Civic Arts Plaza crowd arrived at seven. That corner has been dark for a while now. In August, per Conejo Valley Guide's reporting picked up by Siteline in early July, Erewhon opens there. It is the chain's first Ventura County location. And the thing worth understanding, if you already live here and already walk this plaza, is that the store is not the story. What changes is the shape of the day.
The address matters more than the brand
Erewhon confirmed to What Now LA that the Thousand Oaks store, at 2150 E. Thousand Oaks Boulevard, will open in Summer 2026, with an August debut expected per the local reporting Siteline aggregated on July 5. The company, founded in 1968, is a family-owned Certified B Corp and Certified Organic retailer with ten Southern California locations before this one. The Thousand Oaks build-out will carry the full format: grocery, prepared meals, a cafe, and a Tonic Bar for juices, smoothies, and specialty drinks.
The Lassens footprint the new store inherits was not a small in-line bay. It was a full anchor pad facing the fountain, with parking that empties toward the walking loop around the lake. When a store of that scale sits empty, a plaza's morning economy contracts. The coffee stops still hum, but the two-hour Saturday routine that mixed a grocery errand with a coffee and a lap around the water lost its middle beat. That is what has been missing.
The Lakes has always been an evening room
Look at what draws people to the plaza after 5 p.m. and it is almost entirely programmed by the Bank of America Performing Arts Center across the boulevard. The summer through fall 2026 calendar there is dense: the 805 Freestyle Forever Concert on June 28, the 5 Star Theatricals production of The Wizard of Oz running July 10 and 11 at the Fred Kavli Theatre, and The Wizard of Oz returning October 9 through 18. The Scherr Forum's schedule stacks the Thousand Oaks Philharmonic on May 10, BENISE's Spanish Night by Candlelight on May 15, and a Neil Diamond tribute on May 16. Parking runs a flat sixteen dollars at the Civic Arts garage, debit or credit only, which is worth knowing before you circle.
That programming reliably fills the plaza's restaurants at dinner. Osteria La Buca and RED O anchor the sit-down tier. Cava handles the fast-casual dinner run. Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar and Phil's absorb the after-show overflow. What none of that programming has ever done is generate a matching daytime crowd. The plaza has been a two-shift venue: dead until noon, quiet through the afternoon, then packed from six.
The bet Erewhon is making, whether the company would frame it this way or not, is that the Conejo Valley has a morning appetite the plaza was not serving. The Lassens crowd proves it did. That crowd never fully migrated after the closure. It has been distributed across the Whole Foods Plaza on North Moorpark, the smaller specialty shops on Hillcrest, and home.
The neighbors this reshapes
If you already have a Saturday routine here, the change is not that a new store exists. The change is which of your neighbors' places start pulling a morning shift that used to be an afternoon one. A partial map of who sits within a short walk of the new pad:
- Sette Sorelle and Osteria La Buca on the sit-down Italian side, both dinner-heavy, both likely to see more of a lunch overlap once the cafe traffic settles in
- Phil's on the modern American side, already a strong brunch draw
- Cava as the reliable weekday fast-casual, positioned almost too perfectly next to a Tonic Bar
- Boochies Matcha Bistro, Moody Rooster, and Sunrose California Eatery, the newer wave that has been building weekend loyalty without an anchor helping them
- Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar and Cafe Vivi on the all-day tier that already carry the daytime load and now share it
The interesting question is not whether Erewhon does its own volume. It will. The interesting question is which of those neighbors add a Saturday morning shift to a menu they currently open at eleven.
What the summer calendar actually looks like on the plaza
If you are pacing out July through September as a resident, not a shopper looking to evaluate the neighborhood, the useful frame is this. The Kavli's family programming, led by The Wizard of Oz on July 10 and 11, brings a stroller-heavy crowd that historically parks at the Civic Arts garage and walks over rather than driving across the boulevard. Once Erewhon opens in August, that same crowd has a pre-show option that did not exist last summer. Expect the cafe seating, whatever form it takes, to become a soft holding pen between five and six-thirty on show nights.
For weekend mornings, the walking loop around the lake is the piece that ties everything together. It is roughly a mile, flat, shaded in patches, and it terminates at exactly the pad Erewhon is finishing. A coffee-and-loop routine that used to require driving between two locations collapses into one. That is a small thing. Small things are how a plaza changes character.
The broader retail churn this fits into
Erewhon is the loudest of a longer list of recent Thousand Oaks retail moves that together are reshaping where residents run errands. On North Moorpark Road, the IKEA Plan & Order Point opened at number 60, next to CVS, with a small showroom, consultation appointments, and online-order pickup, and specifically without a restaurant or a Swedish food market attached. The Dollar Tree at 950 Avenida de los Arboles, one of 170 conversions from the former 99 Cents Only chain, is now open. Purrrlandia Cat Lounge and Cafe is coming to the Whole Foods Plaza at 728 North Moorpark Road, with rescue cats, coffee, tea, and light snacks on the menu. Skechers took the former Tillys bay at The Village at Moorpark.
None of these individually is a Saturday-changing arrival. Together they suggest something more structural: the everyday-shopping center of gravity in Thousand Oaks is diversifying away from the two or three dominant plazas it settled into in the 2010s. The Lakes is not being replaced. It is being reweighted, from a dinner-and-show destination to a morning-through-evening one. Erewhon is the piece that makes the arithmetic work.
The residents' version of the story
If you are new to the plaza, Erewhon reads as a chain opening. If you have been walking the fountain loop for ten years, it reads as the second act of the Lassens story: the daytime anchor returning in a different form, with a different price point, and with a customer base that overlaps only partially with the one that came before. The Lassens crowd was not looking for a Tonic Bar. The Erewhon crowd will not always be looking for a supplement wall. Where those two groups meet, and how the plaza's smaller operators adjust their hours to catch both, is what will actually be interesting to watch through the fall.
The short version, for a Saturday in September: the coffee is at Phil's or Boochies, the loop is the loop, the produce run is now next to the fountain again, and dinner is somebody else's decision. The plaza works as one room for the first time in a while.
If you are thinking about how this shift plays into a move within the Conejo Valley, a resale timeline, or a lease decision tied to school-year rhythms, Cris Epstein is glad to walk the plaza and the neighborhoods around it with you. Let's connect.
