Walk through The Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge on the right Saturday morning and you will pass a folding table of hand-thrown ceramics before you pass the Erewhon register. A woman is deciding between a candle from The Chill Wax Candle Co. and a print from Curious Hearts Press while her dog naps in the shade near the stream that still runs through the property. Somewhere behind her, a DJ is setting up for the afternoon. None of this was here when the center first opened. Most of it did not exist before this past March.
That gap matters more than it sounds like it should. The Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge is not new. It is a fully leased, $100 million redevelopment anchored by an Erewhon and an Equinox, the kind of finished retail project that gets written up once when it opens and then goes quiet for years while it does exactly what it was built to do. What is actually changing the way this stretch of Ventura Boulevard functions on a Saturday did not open with the center at all. It arrived five months ago, shows up twice a month, and packs up by 4 p.m.
The finished project, and why finished isn't the same as alive
The center sits at Ventura Boulevard and Coldwater Canyon Avenue, on the footprint of the old Sportsmen's Lodge convention space. Midwood Investment and Development spent roughly $100 million rebuilding it, and within months of reopening it had already reached full lease-up, a rare enough outcome in retail that it made trade press on its own. The tenant roster reads like a list of brands that do not usually share a parking lot: Erewhon, in what is still the San Fernando Valley's only location of the organic market, sits a few doors from Equinox. Vuori and Free People Movement cover athleisure. Sugarfish, Tocaya, and HiHo Cheeseburger handle the food court instinct without feeling like a food court. Rolling Greens took two full levels for a home and garden concept with a wine bar, an apothecary, and a rooftop garden, on top of locations it already runs in Culver City and Beverly Grove. Myodetox and Next Health round out a wellness cluster that, together with Equinox, has made this one of the more talked-about recovery-and-fitness corners in the Valley.
All of that is real, and all of it has been true for years. A shopping center with an Erewhon and an Equinox is a nice amenity. It is not, on its own, a reason a longtime Studio City resident starts treating a Saturday differently than they treated it the year before. Retail centers finish. Neighborhoods do not work that way. They need a reason to show up on a schedule, not just a reason to stop by once.
The market that gave the place a pulse
That reason arrived in March, when Sunshine Makers Market took up residence at The Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge on the second and fourth Saturday of every month, running 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is a small detail with an outsized effect on the calendar. Before March, a Saturday at the center was whatever errand brought you there. Since March, two specific Saturdays a month have a reason of their own, and the crowd that shows up for the market is not the same crowd doing a grocery run at Erewhon.
The August dates are August 8 and August 22, and the vendor list is the kind of thing that only means something if you have actually walked the market. Recent lineups have included Luna Vela Home & Co., Betsey Carter Ceramics, Studio Hsin, The Chill Wax Candle Co., Curious Hearts Press, and Olive Blanche Handmade, alongside live sets from DJ Benofficial. None of these are chains. None of them were part of the original leasing announcement that filled the center years ago. They are the layer that got added once the finished project needed something to do with its Saturdays, and they are exactly the kind of small, specific, changing lineup that makes a market worth checking twice a month instead of once and forgetting about it.
This is not a farmers market in the produce-and-eggs sense. Studio City already has that, on Ventura Place between Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Radford Avenue, running every Sunday morning as it has for years, co-owned by the Studio City Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Studio City Residents Association. That market covers Sunday. Sunshine Makers Market covers two Saturdays. Between the two, a resident now has an actual reason to plan around both ends of the weekend instead of just one.
The Lodge has done this before
There is a pattern here that the property itself has lived through once already, long before any of the current tenants existed. The land traces back to the 1880s under names like Hollywood Trout Farms, when it functioned as a working recreation spot built around natural spring-fed ponds. Old Hollywood came for the fishing. Clark Gable, Bette Davis, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Katharine Hepburn were all regulars during the era when the modern hotel went up alongside the original lodge in 1962 and the ponds still held swans. The fishing itself did not survive forever. The Studio City Sun later reported that the 1971 San Fernando earthquake diverted the natural spring that fed the ponds, and the Los Angeles Health Department closed that chapter of the property's history for good.
What did not close was the reason people kept showing up. Nobody was driving out to a trout farm in the Valley because they desperately needed fish. They came because it was the place where people gathered, and the actual activity underneath that reason changed more than once over the following decades, through fine dining rooms, through a hotel stay favored by touring musicians, through the years it briefly served as emergency housing during 2020, and now through a $100 million retail rebuild. The property has never really been about what is being sold on site. It has been about whether there is a reason to be there on a given day. For a long stretch after the redevelopment reopened, that reason was thinner than the developers probably hoped. The market is what put it back.
What a Saturday here actually looks like now
If you are planning around it, the rhythm is straightforward. Second and fourth Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., is Sunshine Makers Market. Every other day, the center runs as it always has, which means Erewhon for groceries, Equinox or Next Health if the morning is about training rather than browsing, and a lunch decision between Sugarfish, Tocaya, or the newer arrivals that have rotated through the food roster since the center's original tenant announcements. Rolling Greens is worth the full walk-through on its own, not just for the plants but for the rooftop garden and the apothecary section that most people skip on a quick visit.
None of this requires an occasion. That is the actual shift worth naming. A finished, fully leased shopping center is a fine thing to have nearby. A shopping center where two Saturdays a month have their own identity, their own rotating cast of small vendors, and their own reason to show up even if you do not need anything, is a different kind of neighborhood fixture. Studio City has had the first version since the center reopened. It has only had the second version since March.
That is the part worth remembering the next time someone asks what has actually changed at Sportsmen's Lodge. The tenant list has not moved much in years. The reason to go on a Saturday has.
If you already treat a Saturday at Sportsmen's Lodge as part of your week, you know how quickly a neighborhood's rhythm can shift once the right addition lands. If you are thinking about what your next chapter in Studio City or the Westside looks like, Danny Hizami is a good person to talk to when the time comes. Start Your Home Search whenever you are ready.
