Saturday morning at La Encantada looks the way it has for years. Valet is running even though the lot isn't full yet. A couple of dogs are working the courtyard turf while their owners wait for a table. Someone is charging an EV near the AJ's Fine Foods entrance while their kid presses a face against the Apple Store glass. If you haven't looked closely at the directory board lately, though, you're navigating from memory, and that memory is out of date. The tenant roster at this corner of Skyline and Campbell has turned over twice in the last three years. What hasn't changed, and what actually explains why the place still functions as a Foothills habit rather than a strip mall people quietly stop visiting, is the calendar.
The Directory Board Keeps Rewriting Itself
La Encantada opened in November 2003 as a 258,000-square-foot Spanish hacienda-style center, the first of its kind in southern Arizona, built around anchors like AJ's Fine Foods, Anthropologie, Crate & Barrel, and Apple. More than two decades later, the building looks similar. The tenant list does not.
In 2023 alone, the center brought in True Food Kitchen, the health-forward restaurant chain founded in Phoenix by Dr. Andrew Weil of the University of Arizona's Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, along with Tecovas, Levi's, and Psycho Bunny in the spring and summer, then Dry Bar and the piercing studio Rowan that winter. Early in 2026, the rotation continued with women's clothing brand Eileen Fisher and a beauty concept called The Tox, which opened its doors on February 28.
| Wave | Arrivals |
|---|---|
| 2023 (spring/summer) | Tecovas, Levi's, Psycho Bunny |
| 2023 (winter) | Dry Bar, Rowan, True Food Kitchen |
| 2026 (early) | Eileen Fisher, The Tox |
None of that turnover is unusual for a retail property this age. What it means practically is that if you're planning a trip based on what was there the last time you paid attention, check the directory first. The stores you remember may still be there. They may not be.
Who Actually Owns the Building Now
The turnover traces back to a specific transaction. Macerich, which had owned the center since it opened, sold La Encantada in September 2021 for $172 million to a partnership of Town West Realty, HSL Properties, and Iridius Capital. Town West took over as managing partner, and its chairman at the time framed the deal as a long-term bet on experience over transaction, saying the goal was a project that would bring people together from all over Tucson for years to come. HSL Properties' chairman, Humberto Lopez, put the vision more bluntly: an updated and vibrant center built around experiences that can't be replicated online.
That kind of statement is easy to make at a closing and easy to forget six months later. What's notable here is that the follow-through shows up in the record. Town West's president, Toby Horvath, was the named source behind the center's 2023 tenant announcements, and the center's general manager, Jill Harlow, has been explicit in interviews about wanting to add back the kind of large-scale programming that dropped off during the pandemic. In other words, the ownership change wasn't just a new name on the lease documents. It set a direction, and the last few years of activity match the stated plan.
The Constant Underneath the Turnover
Retail comes and goes. The courtyard doesn't. That's where the actual pattern worth knowing sits, if you live nearby and treat this corner as part of your week rather than a place you visit once and photograph.
Last winter, La Encantada ran its Enchanted Snowfall tradition on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from November 28 through December 20, with the center's own team producing faux snow flurries over the courtyard and Blanco Cocina + Cantina providing complimentary hot chocolate. It's not a new idea. The center has run some version of this every winter for years. What's changed is the density of programming around it.
Between the fall of 2025 and the spring of 2026, La Encantada hosted its Fine Art Festival across three separate weekends rather than treating it as a once-a-year event: November 8 and 9, then January 17 and 18, then March 28 and 29. Three appearances in a single stretch is a meaningful jump from the occasional standalone festival, and it lines up directly with what Harlow and Horvath both said they wanted after the pandemic thinned out the center's event calendar. If you noticed more tents in the courtyard on random weekends this past year and wondered whether that was a one-off, it wasn't. It's the strategy working as designed.
This is the part a first-time visitor googling "what's at La Encantada" never picks up on, because it requires having actually watched the place over time. The stores are the least stable part of the property. The calendar is the most stable, and it's getting more crowded on purpose.
Reading the Corner as a Neighbor
None of this changes what La Encantada is for on an average Tuesday. It's still the place in the Foothills where an errand turns into lunch, where you can walk a dog on real grass instead of gravel, and where the second floor has a water bottle filling station and restrooms near Warby Parker if you're out longer than planned. A few things worth knowing if you use the center regularly:
- Free parking is standard, with valet added during busy seasons, generally holidays and festival weekends.
- EV charging stations are available on-site, a detail that matters more each year as more Foothills households go electric.
- The courtyard's turf and open layout make it one of the more dog-friendly commercial spaces in the area, not an afterthought but part of how the center was designed to be used.
- Event weekends, especially the Fine Art Festival dates and the winter Enchanted Snowfall run, bring noticeably heavier foot traffic and tighter parking. If you're running a quick errand, a weekday morning is the more reliable window.
None of these details show up on a store directory. They show up if you've actually spent enough Saturdays there to notice the pattern, which is the whole point.
The Roster Is Disposable. The Habit Isn't.
Twenty-three years in, La Encantada has outlasted a change in ownership, a full pandemic-era pullback in programming, and more tenant changes than most shopping centers see in that span. What kept it from fading the way plenty of early-2000s retail centers have is not any single store. It's that the current ownership group, explicit about wanting the corner to function as a gathering place rather than a transaction site, kept reinvesting in the reasons people show up when they're not buying anything. That's a harder thing to replicate than a new store lineup, and it's the actual reason this corner of the Foothills still works.
Thalia Kyriakis covers the Catalina Foothills the way she covers every neighborhood she serves, by paying attention to the details that only show up over time. If you're weighing a move into the Foothills, curious what your current home might be worth, or simply want a conversation with someone who actually knows this corner of Tucson, reach out to request a confidential consultation or home valuation.
