The Next Thing To Open At Northbrook Court Won't Be A Store

Drive past Northbrook Court on any given weeknight and the parking lot tells you most of what you need to know. A cluster of cars near Neiman Marcus. A few more by the AMC Dine-In Theatres. Long, empty stretches of asphalt everywhere else. If you have lived in Northbrook for more than a few years, you have watched this mall hollow out in slow motion, and you have probably heard some version of the same rumor at least a dozen times: it's finally getting redeveloped, new shops are coming, just wait.

Here is the part almost nobody explains correctly. The next thing to physically rise on that 100-acre property will not be a store. It will be housing, and the retail rebuild that everyone is waiting for is structured so that it cannot realistically happen first.

What actually left in the last year and a half

The pace of departures picked up noticeably starting in 2025. Apple closed its store that February after roughly two decades at the mall, citing the property's "evolving redevelopment plans" in its statement to NBC Chicago. Lululemon left around the same time. Sephora, Forever 21, Auntie Anne's, and Louis Vuitton followed. Forever 21's exit was its own small piece of mall history: that space had been the mall's food court until 2007, when Northbrook Court gutted the communal dining area and handed most of the square footage to the fast-fashion retailer, leaving only four small restaurant slots behind. One of those original four tenants, Tony & Bruno's, was the last one still standing before the whole thing turned over.

Go back further and the pattern holds. Macy's, the mall's largest anchor after Marshall Field's rebranded, announced its closure in May 2019 and shut that summer. The building came down. Lord & Taylor, a tenant since the mall opened in 1976, liquidated everything in August 2020 as the pandemic hit. A discount concept called Shopper's Find tried the Lord & Taylor space in 2021 and was gone within a year. H&M ran a two-story store there for over a decade before closing in January 2022.

What is actually still worth the trip

None of this means the mall is empty. It means it is smaller than it looks from the outside, concentrated into roughly two dozen tenants inside a building designed for a great many more. Neiman Marcus has been open since March 17, 1976, has never left, and told NBC Chicago it has no plans to change that. A handful of names most residents would recognize are still doing real business there:

• Neiman Marcus and Tiffany & Co., the mall's remaining luxury anchors
• Tommy Bahama, Chanel, White House Black Market, The Lego Store, and Chico's
• California Pizza Kitchen and Di Pescara, both still drawing lunch crowds
• Arhaus, in the former Mark Shale space since 2014, and the freestanding Crate & Barrel on the northwest corner
• The 14-screen AMC Dine-In Theatres
• Two Hi-Five Sports Zone locations running camps and classes for kids from age two through seventh grade

That mix is why the mall still functions as a place people go, even while the storefronts around it sit dark.

The plan, and the reason it flipped

Brookfield Properties, which has owned Northbrook Court since 1995, presented its first real redevelopment concept to the village board in April 2023. The price tag was $750 million, a significant jump from the $250 million plan the same company had floated back in 2019. The vision called for an outdoor retail and dining district on the northeast side of the property, walkable streets, open space, and housing on the west side where the Macy's building used to stand. By October 2023 the village board had approved the zoning changes, a tax increment financing district, and a new business district designation to help fund it.

Then, in March 2025, the sequence changed. Brookfield asked the village to let it build the residential piece first, before touching retail, and the village board agreed. Village President Kathryn Ciesla told NBC Chicago the move gives the developer "the opportunity to better respond to current market conditions and build momentum for the overall redevelopment."

That phrasing is doing more work than it sounds like. The financial incentives the village committed to, the TIF and sales tax rebate package, only activate once retail leasing hits specific benchmarks. Half of the planned retail space has to be under lease before the public money kicks in. That sounds like a reasonable taxpayer protection, and it is, but it also means no developer is going to build speculative storefronts into a construction zone with no financing support waiting on the other side. Housing does not have that problem. Suburban apartment demand has stayed strong even as high interest rates made retail redevelopment financing harder to pin down, which is why Brookfield's plan, first reported by The Real Deal, leads with apartments, row houses, and townhomes rather than shops.

The specifics that have been made public describe roughly 315 luxury multifamily units sitting above a 434-space parking deck, built where Macy's once stood, facing what's been called the Great Lawn, an open-air plaza planned alongside a high-end grocery store. The retail district and any further renovation of the mall's interior would come in later phases, once the housing is built, occupied, and generating the rooftops that make a retail leasing pitch to national tenants credible again.

In plainer terms: the empty storefronts you have been driving past for two years are not necessarily going to be filled by new storefronts anytime soon. They are being used as a bridge to housing, which is then supposed to be the bridge back to retail.

What to actually watch for

The earliest realistic construction start for the residential phase was pegged at summer 2026. As of this writing, neither Brookfield nor the village has announced that ground has broken. The property, based on the most recent public reporting, still looked much the same in early 2026 as it did when the concept plan was unveiled three years earlier. That gap between an announced timeline and visible progress has been the defining feature of this project since 2019, when an earlier $250 million version of the plan also stalled before the pandemic effectively killed it.

If you want to track this yourself rather than wait for the next rumor to circulate, the Village of Northbrook's official redevelopment page is the most reliable source, since it posts primary documents rather than secondhand summaries. The mall sits on a genuinely significant piece of ground, wedged between the Tri-State Tollway and the Edens Expressway about 25 miles north of the Loop, and even in its diminished state it remained one of the village's larger commercial taxpayers through the early 2020s. What gets built there, and in what order, is going to shape a fair amount of daily life on that side of town for years.

For now, the honest version of the story is this. The mall is not dying and it is not being reborn on the timeline most people assume. It is in the middle of a financing sequence that puts homes before shops, which means the quiet stretches of parking lot you drive past today are more likely to become someone's front door before they become anyone's storefront.

If you're weighing what a shift like this could mean for property values or timing nearby, Ron Ehlers has spent decades tracking how North Shore development actually plays out on the ground, not just on paper. Let's Connect if you want a grounded read on what's happening in your corner of Northbrook.