"A welcoming community space where people can shop, dine, relax, and spend meaningful time together." That's how the developer behind Oakville Place's next tenant describes the 120,000 square feet still sealed off behind construction walls at 240 Leighland Avenue. Right now it's just drywall and permit signage where Hudson's Bay used to be. By this fall, according to the project announcement covered by Oakville News, it's supposed to be a full-scale grocery store and a family entertainment center.
That sounds like a routine retail update. It isn't. Oakville Place has spent close to a decade cycling through big-box tenants, teen apparel chains, and one failed attempt at gourmet groceries, without ever landing on a version of itself that stuck. What's moving into the old Bay space isn't just a new store. It's the first time in the mall's 45-year history that the anchor tenant is a full-line supermarket, and it's arriving after every other version of "who is this mall for" has already been tried and dropped.
A Mall That Never Had a Grocery Store
Oakville Place opened in March 1981 as an enclosed regional mall on the QEW corridor, built by Cadillac Fairview and later sold to RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust. In 45 years of tenant turnover, it has never had a proper grocery anchor. Sears filled a department-store role until its 2017 bankruptcy triggered a $4 million lease surrender deal with Hudson's Bay, and the space that opened up afterward went to PetSmart, GoodLife Fitness, and Buy Buy Baby rather than a single big-box replacement, according to the mall's own history on Wikipedia.
The closest the mall came to groceries was Pusateri's Fine Foods, a high-end gourmet grocer brought in during the 2014 to 2017 renovation that also reworked the mall's interior and parkade. Pusateri's closed in December 2018, less than two years after it opened.
That failure matters here because it tells you what this mall tried before: a premium, boutique version of grocery retail aimed at a narrow shopper. What's replacing Hudson's Bay is the opposite bet. Nations Fresh Foods is building a 60,000 square foot Nations Experience supermarket geared toward what the company describes as a broad, multicultural shopper base, paired with a food court, a café called Nations Coffee House, and a separate 60,000 square foot family entertainment concept called Forever Young. Nations Fresh Foods has called the format "foodertainment," according to BlogTO's coverage of the announcement.
Combined, the two tenants take up more than a quarter of the mall's roughly 452,000 square foot footprint, which makes this the single largest tenant commitment Oakville Place has made since it opened.
How the Mall's Tenant Mix Has Changed Since 2017
The shift in direction didn't start with the Bay's closure. It goes back to how RioCan handled the Sears vacancy in 2019. At the time, RioCan senior vice president Jeff Ross explained that the mall's previous owner had been chasing a "high-end retail center" model that never matched what the surrounding neighborhood actually needed, and that filling the Sears space with PetSmart, GoodLife Fitness, and Buy Buy Baby instead of a single department store was meant to push more frequent visits rather than occasional big shopping trips.
That repositioning kept happening in pieces. H&M renovated and reopened in 2021. STACK Restaurant and Goodfellas Wood Oven Pizza replaced the mall's Oliver and Bonacini location the same year. Dollarama moved into the upper floor of the old Sears space in 2023, the same year GameStop and Foot Locker both closed and Buy Buy Baby shut down as its parent company, Bed Bath and Beyond, finished its Canadian bankruptcy proceedings. Then in March 2025, Hudson's Bay itself filed for bankruptcy, and by June 2025 every Hudson's Bay location in the country, including Oakville Place's, had closed.
Here's the timeline laid out:
| Year | What Happened at Oakville Place |
|---|---|
| 1981 | Mall opens as an enclosed regional shopping center on the QEW corridor |
| 2014–2017 | Major renovation reworks the interior and parkade; Pusateri's Fine Foods added as a gourmet grocery |
| 2016 | The mall's 12-foot, 6,000-pound chiming clock is removed |
| 2017 | Sears Canada bankruptcy leads to a $4 million lease surrender deal |
| 2018 | Pusateri's closes after less than two years |
| 2019 | PetSmart, GoodLife Fitness, and Buy Buy Baby fill the former Sears space |
| 2023 | Buy Buy Baby, GameStop, and Foot Locker all close |
| 2025 | Hudson's Bay closes nationwide, including at Oakville Place |
| Fall 2026 | Nations Experience supermarket and Forever Young entertainment center open in the former Bay space |
Read that list in order and the pattern is obvious. Every few years, something anchor-sized leaves and something smaller and more scattered fills the gap. Even the mall's physical symbol of permanence, the quarter-hour chiming clock that had stood since opening day, came down in 2016 when ownership changed hands. What's different this time is scale. Nations Experience and Forever Young aren't backfilling a vacancy with three or four mid-size tenants the way the Sears space was handled in 2019. They're taking the entire Bay footprint as a single commitment, and construction is already ahead of its original 2027 target, according to CHCH News, which reported the project is now aiming to finish this fall instead.
What Actually Opens This Fall
The grocery side will carry fresh produce, meat, seafood, and baked goods alongside prepared meals and international products, with a food court offering multiple cuisines. Nations Fresh Foods has said the development is expected to draw shoppers not just from Oakville but from Mississauga and Burlington as well, positioning it as a destination that pulls from beyond the immediate neighborhood rather than one that only serves foot traffic already inside the mall.
Forever Young, the entertainment half of the project, is being built as a family-focused space with activities aimed at visitors of all ages, though neither company has released a detailed list of what that will include closer to opening. What's confirmed is the size: 60,000 square feet, comparable to the grocery side, which puts it well beyond the scale of a typical mall arcade or play area.
No official opening date has been set beyond "later this fall," and neither company has said whether the two spaces will operate under one connected entrance or as separate storefronts within the same footprint.
The Rest of the Block
Oakville Place sits inside College Park, a neighborhood that already juggles a few identities that don't usually share a zip code. Sheridan College's Trafalgar campus is a five-minute walk away, home to the Faculty of Animation, Arts and Design and to the Trafalgar Gallery, a public exhibition space where curator Valentyna Onisko and gallery technologist Alex Nagy rotate in student and faculty work throughout the year. A few minutes in the other direction, the Oakville Golf Club has been running its nine-hole course along Sixteen Mile Creek since 1921, making it one of the oldest private clubs in the GTA, older than the mall by 60 years.
A student animation gallery, a century-old golf club, and a mall that has reshaped its tenant mix several times over the past decade all sit within walking distance of each other in College Park. A full-line supermarket paired with a family entertainment center gives Oakville Place an anchor built around frequent, everyday visits, and it arrives in the same neighborhood where a college campus and a 1921 golf club already share the map.
If you're keeping an eye on how College Park keeps changing, from the mall on Leighland Avenue to the trails along Sixteen Mile Creek, Rina DiRisio and her team track these shifts as part of knowing this stretch of Oakville block by block. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening in this corner of town.
