For most of the last two years, the stretch of Biscayne Boulevard just north of Aventura Mall had a strange, unfinished quality. Half of it was one of the most successful retail properties in the country. The other half, a block away, was a mostly hollowed-out strip center built on the bones of a Sears and a Kmart, waiting for someone to decide what it was for.
That waiting ended in December 2025. And if you have not walked the connecting stretch of Abigail Road since the start of this year, the change is bigger than a new sign out front.
What Used to Sit There
The property at 19505 Biscayne Boulevard opened in 2023 as Esplanade Aventura, built by Seritage Growth Properties on land that used to hold the mall's old Sears and Kmart anchors. Seritage was formed specifically to redevelop shuttered Sears and Kmart real estate nationwide, and this 219,000-square-foot, 12.3-acre parcel with its own 512-space garage was one of its Florida bets. It never quite filled in. For anyone who lives nearby and ran errands along that corridor, it read as a placeholder next to a mall that was breaking attendance records.
The Same Family Now Owns Both Sides
That placeholder status ended when Turnberry and Simon Property Group, the co-owners of Aventura Mall, paid $131 million for the Esplanade property in December 2025, a price that worked out to almost $600 per square foot. They renamed it The Abbey at Aventura the same month.
The detail that matters for anyone who shops or eats along this corridor is not the price. It's the ownership. Aventura Mall itself is not fully owned by Turnberry and Simon either. Macy's and Bloomingdale's own their own boxes outright, while Turnberry and Simon control the rest of the mall. Now that same ownership group controls the property next door too, and they have said plainly that they intend to run the two as one experience rather than two competing leases. Turnberry principal Harrison Soffer put it simply when the deal closed: "We will enhance the property and deliver more lifestyle-driven environments."
That is not typical landlord language for a strip center. It is language for a district.
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you have not stopped by recently, here is what has actually opened at The Abbey this year, not what is still rendering in a leasing brochure:
- Anatomy Fitness opened its Aventura location on January 9, 2026, a 26,000-square-foot, two-floor club the brand calls its largest and most innovative build yet. Anatomy's flagship opened in Miami Beach back in 2014, and the brand has since expanded to Midtown, Coconut Grove, and Doral before landing here.
- Industrious coworking, Pure Barre, and Tremble fill out the fitness and work side of the property.
- STK Steakhouse, Sweetgreen, North Italia, Pura Vida, Jarana (a Peruvian pisco bar concept), and JOEY Aventura, a two-level dining room with a large patio, cover the food side.
- Salt & Straw ice cream was announced alongside the Anatomy build-out and is still working through construction as of this writing.
Turnberry has also said more than 50,000 additional square feet of tenants are already signed but not yet open, with further development rights in place for the property. In practical terms, if you drive past and see empty storefronts today, that is not a sign the project stalled. It is the next phase still under construction.
Why the Mall Award Is Actually About Foot Traffic, Not Prestige
In June 2026, Aventura Mall was named Best Mall in the United States by USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards for the second consecutive year, one of only 20 malls nominated nationwide. That is a nice line for a press release, but the number underneath it is the one that explains why The Abbey needed to exist at all.
Between January and May 2026, the average Aventura Mall visitor spent 104 minutes on property, compared to roughly 60 minutes over the same stretch a year earlier. That is not a modest uptick. It's visitors nearly doubling their dwell time in a single year. Combine that with a 9% year-over-year jump in first-quarter 2026 foot traffic and you get a mall that had, by any practical measure, run out of room to hold the people who wanted to stay longer. The Abbey is not a separate amenity. It's overflow capacity for a mall that outgrew its own footprint.
What the World Cup Already Proved
This summer gave an early test of how the two properties work together, and it's worth pointing out because it's easy to miss if you were traveling. The 2026 FIFA World Cup played matches at Hard Rock Stadium, about seven miles west, and Aventura Mall's ARTS program had built its cultural calendar around exactly this kind of tie-in for months, alongside earlier ties to the Miami Open and the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix. Both Aventura Mall and The Abbey ran match-viewing lounges through the tournament, and the mall set up an official FIFA store along with a jersey wall representing all 48 competing nations.
For anyone who spent part of June or July on that stretch of Biscayne Boulevard, the two properties were functioning as a single event footprint, not two separate outings you'd plan around. That's the clearest evidence yet that the ownership's plan to merge the two experiences isn't just a leasing strategy. It already worked once, at scale, with real crowds.
What This Actually Changes About a Saturday
The version of this corridor that existed a year ago required a choice. You could go to Aventura Mall for the Apple Store, Eataly, or a Nordstrom return, or you could drive past the half-empty strip center next door and keep going. There was no reason to treat the two as one trip.
That's no longer true. A workout at Anatomy's two-floor Aventura club, lunch at Sweetgreen or JOEY, an afternoon at Industrious, and dinner at STK or Jarana can now happen without moving your car, all inside a property that eight months ago was still finishing construction. The mall next door adds the Apple Store, Eataly, and whatever pop-up the ARTS program has running that month. Abigail Road, the access road connecting the two, is the only thing you cross to get from one to the other.
None of this required you to do anything differently. It required the ownership on both sides of that road to finally be the same, and for that ownership to spend the better part of a year building out the second half of a day that used to end when you left the mall parking lot.
If you've driven past The Abbey and assumed it was still the leftover Esplanade, it's worth a second look. The empty storefronts you remember from last year are mostly gone.
If you're weighing a move to this part of Aventura or Sunny Isles and want to understand how corridors like this one factor into property values and day-to-day livability, Shayna Davidov Hanson works this market daily and can walk you through what's changing block by block. You can also browse her guide to the Sunny Isles, Aventura, Golden Beach, and Hollywood Beach area for a broader look at the neighborhood.
