Walk through The Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge on a Wednesday evening this fall and you will find the same scene that has played out most weeks since February: families spread across the lower deck around 5 p.m., a puppet show or a musician working the crowd, kids darting along the stream-side walkways while parents catch up over a Civil Coffee. It is the kind of routine that makes a shopping center feel like a town square instead of a strip mall. But check the flyer for the plaza's signature Saturday event, the one billed as a monthly tradition, and the math stops adding up. The Sunshine Makers Market calls itself a "second Saturdays" residency. This past August, it showed up twice.
That is not a typo. It is a pattern worth understanding if you actually live near Ventura and Coldwater Canyon and plan your weekends around what is happening five minutes from your driveway.
A market that keeps outrunning its own name
The Sunshine Makers Market first set up at the plaza in 2023, ran a monthly residency through 2024, and by 2025 had branded itself around a simple promise: second Saturdays, every month, at The Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge. It is a clean pitch and an easy one to remember.
August broke that pattern. The market ran on the 8th, which is genuinely the second Saturday of the month, and then again on the 22nd, which is the fourth. Count the Saturdays yourself: August 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29. Two market dates landed in a single month, and only one of them matches the name on the tin.
September pulls the schedule back into line. The next market is set for September 12, which is the actual second Saturday, so the brand promise holds again this month. None of this is a knock on the market. Weather, vendor logistics, and a growing roster of makers reroute outdoor markets everywhere. The point for a Studio City local is simpler: the name on the flyer is not a guarantee, and the only way to know which Saturday you are getting in any given month is to check before you plan around it.
What is actually on the calendar this month
Here is the confirmed rhythm for September, pulled directly from the market's own listings:
| Day | Event | Where | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wednesdays, through October | Kids Club: music, puppet shows, storytelling | Lower deck | 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. |
| Saturday, September 12 | Sunshine Makers Market | Throughout the plaza | 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. |
The Kids Club runs February through October, so this is close to its last full month before the seasonal calendar quiets down for winter. Earlier this summer, the plaza also hosted a weekly HOKA Run Club on Thursday evenings, open to all paces, another sign that the center is being programmed as a gathering spot rather than just a row of storefronts.
The newest storefront, and the ones that have been there since day one
The plaza's anchor tenant has always been Erewhon, which opened here in June as the market's seventh location and its first in the San Fernando Valley. Vuori, Van Leeuwen, and Tocaya rounded out that original 2021 rolling opening, and most of that original lineup is still standing.
What is new this year is FEATURE, the sneaker and streetwear retailer that opened its Studio City location in January. Founded in Las Vegas in 2010, FEATURE built its reputation as a boutique sneaker shop before growing into a nationally recognized retailer carrying Nike, Adidas, New Balance, and Comme des Garçons alongside its own private label. Its arrival is a small but telling data point: just over five years after Erewhon's 2021 debut anchored the plaza, this corner is still attracting national retail brands rather than backfilling empty storefronts, which is not something every outdoor shopping center from that era can say.
Half the property is quietly becoming something else
Here is the part that explains why you might have noticed fencing or activity on the east side of the same address. The Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge only occupies part of the original 8.76-acre site. The other half, where the actual Sportsmen's Lodge Hotel once stood, is being redeveloped into 520 residential units, including 78 designated as very low income affordable housing, along with roughly 18,000 square feet of restaurant space and nearly 28,000 square feet of additional retail. The Los Angeles City Council backed the project. Architecture firm Marmol Radziner is handling the residential design, working alongside Olin Studio, the same landscape architecture firm that helped shape the retail side's redevelopment years earlier.
It is a strange kind of continuity. The hotel that hosted Katherine Hepburn and Clark Gable during Hollywood's golden era, the same property that later became a convention center before its 2021 rebirth as a shopping plaza, is now shedding its remaining hotel identity entirely in favor of housing. The shopping side keeps adding tenants and running weekly programming. The hotel side is disappearing. Both are happening on the same eight and a half acres at the same time.
Why the inconsistency is the actual useful information
If you already live in Studio City, the takeaway here is not "go check out a shopping center." You already know where it is. The useful information is that the plaza's own marketing oversells its predictability, and the property's future is actively in motion on the residential side. That combination means the neighborhood's version of this corner in 2027 will look different from the one you are walking through in September 2026, even if the coffee shop and the sushi counter stay exactly where they are.
The practical habit worth building: check the plaza's own event listing before you plan a Saturday around the Makers Market, because "second Saturday" did not hold up this past August. And if you are curious about the construction activity on the east side of the property, what you are seeing is the early stage of 520 new homes rising where the old hotel and convention space used to sit.
For more on what is shifting around this stretch of Ventura Boulevard, the Studio City neighborhood page tracks the broader picture, and our earlier look at Studio City's everyday hot spots covers more of the corner's daily rhythm beyond this one plaza.
If you want a local read on how this kind of change, a thriving retail corner sitting next to a major residential build, tends to shift a specific block's character over the next few years, The Agent Ramos tracks these shifts neighborhood by neighborhood. Book a free neighborhood strategy call and we will walk through what is actually changing on your street, not just what the flyers say.
