Drive across Novi this month and you'll pass two construction projects that have nothing to do with each other, except that they're both rewriting where people in this city actually go on a Saturday. One sits on Grand River Avenue, on a lot that used to be a coin-operated car wash. The other sits inside a nearly fifty-year-old mall, in a wing that's been empty since Sears pulled out in 2019.
Only one of them is done.
Sakura Novi, the Asian-themed development near 11 Mile and Grand River, has spent the past year filling up with tenants, throwing open its doors, and pulling in weekend crowds that stretch out of the bakery and into the plaza. Meanwhile, the much-hyped overhaul of Twelve Oaks Mall's old Sears space, the one bringing in Dick's House of Sport, Primark, and Round1, is still mid-build. If you've been telling friends to meet you at "the new spot by the mall," you might be a few months early.
What's Actually Running At Sakura Novi Right Now
Sakura Novi opened its Sakura Gardens plaza and its Paris Baguette bakery-cafe on the same day last October, and the businesses that followed haven't slowed down since. What's currently open includes:
- Paris Baguette, the South Korean bakery chain, which draws lines out the door on weekends
- Klawsome!, billed as Michigan's first standalone claw-machine arcade, opened by a Novi family who built it around their own kids
- Chubby Cattle's Wagyu Shabu House, an all-you-can-eat hot pot concept that opened last November
Dancing Pine Korean Steakhouse and Cloud Boba Tea have both signed on as tenants too, part of the same wave of openings, though neither has been confirmed as seating customers yet in local coverage. Teso Life, a Japanese-style department store carrying everything from snacks to housewares, and Book Off, a Japanese secondhand chain making its first stop in the Midwest, round out the lineup still to come. All four have signed leases. None have confirmed open dates yet.
What makes this worth noting isn't just the novelty. It's the pace. A development that took years to move from city council approval to groundbreaking went from ribbon-cutting to weekend foot traffic jams in under twelve months. Local coverage in the spring described the plaza filling up on weekends with families circulating between the arcade, the bakery, and the pond, the kind of organic crowd that developers spend years trying to manufacture. Sakura Novi got there fast, and it got there on the quiet side of town, not the mall corridor everyone assumed would get the next big opening.
Two Builds, Two Clocks
| Project | Location | Status as of late August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Sakura Novi | Grand River Ave near 11 Mile | Core tenants open and drawing weekend crowds; four more (Dancing Pine, Cloud Boba Tea, Teso Life, Book Off) signed but not confirmed open |
| Twelve Oaks Sears wing | Novi Rd at I-96 | Under construction; Primark and Round1 targeted for first half of 2026, Dick's House of Sport targeted for the fourth quarter |
That table is the whole story in miniature. One project overshot expectations. The other is still working through a phased build that hasn't fully caught up to its own timeline.
Why The Old Sears Wing Is Taking Longer
The mall's general manager laid out the sequence when the redevelopment was announced: Primark and Round1 were supposed to be the faster openings, both slotted for the first half of 2026, while Dick's House of Sport, the anchor tenant, was always going to take longer because of what it's actually building. This isn't a standard retail buildout. Dick's House of Sport is putting in a climbing wall, a running track, multiple golf simulator bays, and an outdoor turf field that converts into an ice rink in winter. That's a fundamentally different construction timeline than hanging shelves and running a register.
As of this writing, no formal grand-opening date has been publicly announced for the Dick's House of Sport space, and the fourth quarter of 2026 starts in about a month. If you've been holding out for the batting cages and the golf bays, the wait is close to over, but it isn't over yet. Primark and Round1, the lighter builds slated for earlier in the year, are the pieces most likely to already be live or very close to it if you haven't checked in a while.
The mall's own framing of this project matters here too. This isn't a cosmetic refresh. Filling a 200,000 square foot department store vacancy with three experience-driven tenants, instead of another department store, is the kind of bet that signals what mall ownership thinks shoppers actually want now: something to do, not just something to buy. Whether that bet pays off in foot traffic won't be fully testable until the anchor tenant is actually open.
The Rest Of The Map Is Filling In Too
Sakura Novi and the Twelve Oaks redevelopment are the two biggest stories, but they're not happening in isolation. Novi has had a genuinely busy year on the retail and dining front. Raising Cane's opened its new location on Novi Road on August 3, 2026, with the chain hosting giveaways and hiring more than a hundred workers for the launch. Gardner White, the Michigan furniture retailer, opened a new Novi showroom on August 20, 2026, part of a statewide push that also moved the company's corporate headquarters to Bloomfield Hills. On the golf and recreation side, PGA Tour Superstore has been running on Haggerty Road for a while now, the first location of its kind in the state, and it still hosts weekly Saturday clinics for golfers of all levels.
None of these openings are connected to each other or to the two bigger projects. That's actually the point. Novi isn't in the middle of one big redevelopment story. It's in the middle of several smaller ones happening at once, on different corners of the city, on different construction schedules, run by different companies that have never spoken to each other. The cumulative effect, if you've lived here the whole time, is a city that feels like it's added a new place to go almost every month since last fall.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you're planning a weekend and want somewhere that's actually open and worth the trip, Sakura Novi is the safer bet right now. The crowds are real, the core businesses are running, and the handful of tenants still signing on, Teso Life and Book Off among them, are bonus additions rather than reasons to wait.
If you've been waiting to try the golf simulators or the climbing wall at Dick's House of Sport, keep an eye out over the next few months. The fourth-quarter target the mall's management laid out puts a realistic opening window between now and the end of the year, but nothing has been confirmed publicly yet. Worth checking before you make the drive expecting to walk in.
Either way, the map of what's new in Novi keeps shifting fast enough that it's worth checking again before you assume last month's information still holds. That's usually a good sign for a place. It means people are still building here, and still betting that residents will show up.
If you're weighing what these changes mean for property values in the neighborhoods around Grand River or the mall corridor, or you're just curious what your own home might be worth as Novi keeps adding reasons to stick around, The Siciliano Group is a call away. Get your instant home valuation and we'll walk you through what's actually moving in this market, not just what's under construction.
