Plaza del Lago Went Global. Downtown Wilmette Got the Local Shops Back.

Walk from Hermès at Plaza del Lago to Yellow Bird's new storefront on Wilmette Avenue and you'll cover about a mile, most of it along Sheridan Road and then west on Wilmette Avenue past the library. Do it on a Saturday afternoon and you'll pass a Parisian handbag counter that opened its doors on August 8, then twenty minutes later step into a stationery shop that has sold invitations and gift wrap in this village for more than 40 years. Both are technically the same commercial district. Neither would recognize the other as competition anymore.

That's the part worth sitting with if you live here. Wilmette's two big retail addresses, the century-old Plaza del Lago and the Wilmette Avenue corridor everyone just calls downtown, used to blur into each other. A resident could find a shoe repair, a swimsuit, a chicken dinner, or a wedding gift in either place without much thought to which one they were standing in. Over the past three years, under new ownership at the plaza, those two addresses have sorted themselves into distinct identities, and the businesses that got pushed out of one landed, almost without exception, in the other.

The Same Block Absorbed Four Storefronts

When Boston-based WS Development bought Plaza del Lago in 2022, the shopping center's tenant roster started to turn over fast. Four of the plaza's longest-tenured local businesses gave up their spaces there and reopened within a few blocks of each other on Wilmette Avenue, between Central Avenue and Green Bay Road.

Yellow Bird Stationery, Invitations and Gifts, in Wilmette for more than 40 years, moved into 1199 Wilmette Avenue, a space between Orvis and Panera Bread. Owner Cindy Manhoff, who grew up in the village, said she wanted to keep the shop in a community that had supported it for decades. Hanig's Footwear, a 28-year plaza tenant and a business that has operated for 79 years with a Michigan Avenue location in Chicago, took a spot at 1181 Wilmette Avenue. Co-owner Peter Hanig said the timing simply felt right for a change. Chantilly Lace, which has fitted intimate wear and bras in Wilmette since 1995, went back to a storefront at 1177 Wilmette Avenue that owner Larisa Olson said she had coveted for years before the space actually opened up. Giggles and Giraffes, the children's boutique that shared its plaza footprint with La Colonna, made the same move to downtown Wilmette.

Not every plaza departure ended on that block. Clucker's Charcoal Chicken, a Highwood-based rotisserie spot that had operated a takeout location in the plaza for three years, closed for good on October 20, 2024, after owner Deb Merdinger said she and her husband could not find a suitable new space on short notice. Rosati's Pizza closed its plaza location. Char Crews shut down entirely. John Plunkett Interiors relocated, but to Green Bay Road in neighboring Winnetka rather than to downtown Wilmette. The pattern holds for the shops with the deepest local roots and the most name recognition. Everyone else scattered or folded.

What Moved In When They Left

Plaza del Lago's new tenant list reads like a different shopping center altogether. Hermès opened its Wilmette storefront on August 8 of this year, selling handbags that run well into five figures from a space with a spiral staircase and ready-to-wear collections on the second floor. Oscar de la Renta soft-opened in early August. James Perse, Lilly Pulitzer, LoveShackFancy, and Lola + The Boys have all signed on, alongside Space 519, a designer boutique that a New York Times reader poll named among the top 25 clothing stores in the country. The Henry, an all-day restaurant from Fox Restaurant Concepts, opened June 3 with a circular bar, a wraparound patio, and a hiring push for 164 positions across the North Shore.

Diane Mahady, president and CEO of Hermès Americas, said in a statement that the brand was thrilled to open at the plaza and had been warmly welcomed by the Wilmette community. WS Development President Samantha David called the tenant lineup everything her team could have hoped for in ushering the century-old shopping center into what she described as its next chapter. The plaza, built in 1928 and often cited as the second-oldest outdoor shopping center in the country, still keeps its legacy grocery and pharmacy anchors, Jewel-Osco and CVS, along with Convito Cafe and Market and Burhop's Seafood. But the storefronts around them now skew toward brands you'd expect on Oak Street, not a lakefront shopping center that spent decades as a suburban stop for shoe repairs and stationery.

The Village Center Wasn't Just Catching Overflow

It would be easy to read downtown Wilmette as a landing pad for plaza refugees, but two of its biggest recent additions had nothing to do with the shakeup at Sheridan Road.

Small Cheval, the scaled-down spinoff of Chicago's Au Cheval, opened at 3 p.m. on August 13, 2025, inside a 150-year-old former train depot at 1139 Wilmette Avenue that the restaurant group Hogsalt bought from the village for roughly $2 million in 2023. The path to opening took two years and included a fight over signage, since Wilmette does not allow rooftop signs, which the Appearance Review Commission voted against before the Village Board approved it anyway. Village President Senta Plunkett said the community had been eagerly awaiting the opening. The building itself came with restrictions baked into the sale: it cannot be altered, relocated, or demolished without village approval, and Wilmette retains right of first refusal if Small Cheval ever tries to sell.

A few blocks over, a longer-running vacancy is finally close to ending. The building at 200 Skokie Boulevard has sat empty since 2019, and two separate redevelopment attempts fell through before this one: a McDonald's proposal in 2023 and 2024, and a Murray Bros. Caddyshack concept in 2021 and 2022. Buttermilk, a breakfast and lunch chain founded in Geneva in 2014 with locations in Downers Grove, Naperville, and Vernon Hills, is now weeks from opening there, according to owner Danny Shamoon, who told The Record North Shore in late September that people walk in daily asking when the doors will open. Wilmette trustees approved an economic incentive agreement with Shamoon in 2025 that includes up to $150,000 in sales tax revenue remittance over ten years, structured so the village collects the first $20,000, Buttermilk the next $30,000, and the remainder splits between them. Shamoon said rain had pushed back the buildout timeline but that the final pieces, from parking lot striping to equipment delivery, were falling into place.

Reading the Map as It Actually Sits Today

None of this happened by coincidence, and none of it is finished. The plaza's transformation was a deliberate strategy from an ownership group that told the village board directly it planned to reopen with a curated, higher-end mix. The businesses that didn't fit that mix left, and the ones with the strongest customer loyalty found new ground close enough to keep their regulars. Downtown Wilmette Avenue, already anchored by the weekly farmers market and the annual Wilmette Art Fair each August, picked up four established retailers, a nationally known burger spot in a landmark building, and soon a breakfast counter in a space that had defeated two previous tenants.

For anyone who lives in the village, the practical version of this is simple: the shoe store, the stationery shop, and the lingerie fitting you used to find at the lake are now a short walk from the library instead, while the plaza itself has become the place you go to look, not necessarily to run errands. Two commercial identities used to overlap in one place. Now they sit less than a mile apart, and each one does something the other doesn't.

If you're weighing what a shift like this means for a specific block or building in Wilmette, Cadence Realty tracks these changes as part of daily coverage of the Wilmette market. Schedule a concierge consultation if you want a local read on how a particular street or corridor is trending before you make a move.