Drive past Biltmore Fashion Park today and the corner at Camelback and 24th Street looks different than it has in three decades. Saks Fifth Avenue, which anchored that spot since 1995, closed by the end of April after its parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. The 92,000-square-foot store's closure eliminated 67 jobs, the first major anchor to go dark at the Biltmore since RED Development bought the property in 2024.
If you live in the Biltmore, this is the kind of news that reads like an ending. It isn't. It's the same thing this shopping center has done to itself at least twice before, and understanding why matters more than mourning the store.
The Anchor Has Never Actually Been Fixed
Biltmore Fashion Park opened in 1963 on 31 acres that were, at the time, considered the outskirts of Phoenix. Its original anchors were I. Magnin and Saks Fifth Avenue, joined five years later by The Broadway. That first Saks store, the one that gave the center its early luxury identity, still stands. It just isn't Saks anymore. When Federated Department Stores retired the I. Magnin brand in 1994, Saks moved into the larger former I. Magnin building, a 90,000-square-foot space, and left its original home behind. That original Saks building is now Life Time, the diamond-level fitness club with the rooftop beach club that faces Camelback Mountain.
So the store that closed this spring isn't the Biltmore's founding anchor. It's the second address that store ever occupied, and the center has already proven it knows how to recast an anchor space into something residents actually use on a weekly basis rather than a few times a year. That history is the reason a CoStar analysis published in April 2026 named Biltmore Fashion Park, alongside Fashion Show in Las Vegas, as one of the malls positioned to come out ahead of this closure rather than behind it. The analyst's read was specific: landlords at top-tier centers can re-lease abandoned department store space at meaningfully higher rents per square foot than the department store was paying, because those leases were often signed decades ago at legacy rates. Lower-tier malls losing Saks locations elsewhere in the country, the same report noted, don't have that leverage. The Biltmore does.
RED Development, which bought the center in 2024, said as much directly. Mike Ebert, the firm's managing partner, told local reporters the closure "accelerates our vision" for the property, part of a plan to reimagine the center around how people actually shop, dine, and gather today rather than how they did decades ago. RED had already floated plans for a ten-story mixed-use tower on the property, first announced in late 2024 with more specifics emerging by the end of 2025. The Saks vacancy doesn't derail that plan. It gives it a faster starting point.
What Actually Fills a Weeknight Right Now
None of that history changes the fact that Saks wasn't where most Biltmore residents were spending their Tuesday nights anyway. What has changed the neighborhood's daily rhythm is everything that opened, or is about to open, around it this year, mostly in spaces far smaller than a department store.
Herman Miller opened a showroom next to Ralph Lauren in late February, its first Arizona location, built around a 2,060-square-foot space that shows the Aeron chair and the rest of the brand's ergonomic design line. FP Movement, the activewear label under the same corporate umbrella as Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie, opened in the gap between Rye 51 and Warby Parker this spring, with [solidcore] opening a strength studio nearby around the same time. Alo Yoga is still to come, taking over the former My Sister's Closet space in a 4,349-square-foot buildout expected to open later this year. La La Land Kind Café is set to make its Phoenix debut in a compact space near True Food Kitchen, adding a coffee and casual food option to a stretch of the center that previously ran heavier toward sit-down dinners.
None of these are anchor-scale leases. That's the point. The Biltmore's daily foot traffic increasingly comes from residents stopping in for a workout, a coffee, a design showroom browse, not from the kind of quarterly department store trip a Saks used to generate.
The same shift shows up next door at The Esplanade, technically a separate property but functionally part of the same walk for anyone who lives in the surrounding streets. Camello opened there on February 2, the third and flagship concept from 151 Hospitality, the group behind Little Pickle Jewish Deli and the martini bar The Mercer, both of which opened at The Esplanade in 2025. Camello seats 150 across 6,000 square feet, runs lunch through late-night service, and was designed around the Camelback Mountain views the name references. Its owners, Rick Phillips and Peter Hearn, framed the opening as a bet on the corridor's rebound, citing their own two prior restaurants alongside neighboring venues like Global Ambassador and Steak 44 as evidence the stretch is drawing real momentum again.
The Sunday That Didn't Used to Exist
The center has also started programming its public space in ways it never did before. On March 15, Biltmore Fashion Park held the first installment of a new free Sunday series called Art Walk at Biltmore Fashion Park, produced with Axiom Contemporary Gallery and Artlink, featuring rotating exhibitions from Arizona artists displayed across the outdoor property. It followed a limited pop-up from Biltmore Fine Art Gallery, led by Robert Casterline, co-founder of the Casterline Goodman Gallery, which has established locations in Aspen and Napa. Two weeks later, on March 28, the center hosted the Arizona WineGrowers Festival, a tasting event built around more than 40 Arizona wineries.
None of this existed at Biltmore Fashion Park a few years ago. A shopping center that used to close its cultural calendar around holiday window displays now has a recurring gallery walk and a wine festival tied to the state's growing vineyard industry. For residents, that means the center has quietly become a Sunday destination in a way it wasn't before, independent of anything happening in the anchor spaces.
Why the Store Leaving Matters Less Than It Sounds
The instinct when a 30-year anchor tenant closes is to read it as decline. The Biltmore's own history argues against that reading. The center has swapped its most prominent tenant identity at least once before, moving Saks itself from one building to another in the mid-1990s, and turned the space it left behind into one of the most heavily used amenities on the property today. What's happening now looks like the same pattern on a faster timeline: an anchor exit, a redevelopment plan already in motion, and a wave of smaller, higher-frequency tenants filling in around the edges before the big vacancy is even resolved.
If you live in the Biltmore, the practical takeaway isn't concern about the shopping center's future. It's that the version of the neighborhood exterior you've been picturing, the one where Saks is at the corner, True Food Kitchen is the newest thing, and the calendar is quiet outside of holidays, is already out of date. The corner has a wine festival now. It has a design showroom. It has a Mexican restaurant with a dance floor a few hundred feet from where you park.
The building will keep changing what's inside it. It's been doing that since 1963.
If the pace of change around your own property has you thinking about what your home is actually worth in this market, or what a well-timed presentation could do for it, Luxe Client Group is glad to talk it through. Request Your Confidential Consultation whenever you're ready.
