What's Finally Moving Into Cornerstone's Empty Whole Foods, And Why The Square Footage Matters

"It's nice that it's right across the street," Sheila Reno told a reporter this spring, watching the new Whole Foods take shape from her spot behind the counter at Los Gatos Cafe. Reno has run that cafe since before Whole Foods even had a Bay Area store, and she had a front-row seat to something most Los Gatos residents only half followed: the town's main grocery anchor packed up and moved two blocks north, and the building it left behind sat dark for the better part of a year.

That building finally has a tenant. But the story isn't really about a grocery store getting replaced by another grocery store. It's about what happens to the leftover square footage when the new tenant needs less space than the old one did, and what that gap means for a shopping center that's been the town's default errand stop since 1994.

The Move That Started It

For 32 years, Whole Foods anchored the Cornerstone of Los Gatos shopping center at 15980 Los Gatos Blvd, at the intersection with Blossom Hill Road. It was a 22,000-square-foot store, the kind of size that made sense in 1994 and felt tight by 2026. On April 15, Whole Foods opened its replacement about a half mile away at 15650 Los Gatos Blvd, at Los Gatos-Almaden Road: a 43,130-square-foot store, according to the company's own announcement, with a coffee and juice bar, more seating, and a dedicated parking lot the old location never had. Mayor Rob Moore called it a significant upgrade for a town that had simply outgrown its old grocery footprint.

The new store sits on a parcel with its own backstory. It's the former site of a Chevrolet dealership that closed in 2008 and sat largely vacant for over a decade until Sand Hill Property Company redeveloped it, adding a Tesla service center next door. For residents who'd driven past that empty lot for fifteen years, the new Whole Foods wasn't just a bigger store. It was a formerly blighted corner of Los Gatos Boulevard finally doing something again.

A Vacant Anchor For A Year

What got less attention was what happened at the old address once Whole Foods left. Cornerstone lost its anchor tenant, and the space sat empty for roughly a year, which is a long stretch for a shopping center built around one big-name draw. Reaction split the way these things usually do. One longtime resident, Claire, told a reporter the old store had simply gotten too small and too dated, and that the town needed the upgrade. Another resident, Jacquie, said she preferred the smaller footprint and worried the new store would feel oversized, telling the reporter she didn't care for what she called "Disneyland-sized stores."

Cornerstone wasn't standing still during that gap, either. The Rite Aid next door to the old Whole Foods closed and has been in the process of becoming a Club Fitness, according to updates on the Los Gatos Town Facebook page. So while the anchor spot sat dark, the rest of the center kept turning over, which is worth knowing if you've assumed Cornerstone was frozen in place for a year. It wasn't. It was just missing its biggest tenant.

The Grocer Filling The Gap

The name that finally showed up for that anchor space is one Bay Area shoppers know from a different city. Gus's Community Market, the family-run San Francisco grocer, is set to open its first location outside the city at 15980 Los Gatos Blvd, in the exact spot Whole Foods vacated. The Vardakastanis family started the business in 1981 as Haight Street Market and now runs five locations in San Francisco. This will be their sixth store, and by their own account, customer demand for a South Bay location is what pushed them across the bridge. The opening is slated for spring 2027, and the store will run about 18,000 square feet.

That timeline matters for anyone doing math on the neighborhood. Whole Foods left in April 2026. If Gus's opens in spring 2027, Cornerstone will have gone roughly a full year without its grocery anchor, longer if the opening slips, which is common with buildouts of this size.

The Math Nobody's Talking About

Here's where the story stops being a simple swap. Whole Foods occupied 22,000 square feet at that address. Gus's is taking roughly 18,000. That's about 4,000 square feet of retail space at Cornerstone that won't be grocery at all.

A smaller footprint than Whole Foods occupied leaves room in the center for additional tenants, which is a detail easy to miss if you're only tracking "grocery store replaces grocery store." It means Cornerstone isn't just getting its anchor back. It's getting its anchor back at a slightly smaller size, with leftover square footage that could go to something the center didn't have room for before, whether that's a second restaurant, a boutique fitness studio, or something nobody's announced yet.

What Actually Changes On A Tuesday Grocery Run

For daily life, the practical shift is this: Los Gatos is about to have two full-size grocery stores serving roughly the same population that used to have one. The new Whole Foods, at Los Gatos-Almaden Road, is nearly double the size of what it replaced and stocks more than 2,000 items from California-based suppliers, alongside its own coffee and juice bar. Gus's, once it opens at the old Cornerstone address, brings a San Francisco grocer's approach to a corner that's been synonymous with Whole Foods for three decades.

If you live on the west side of town near Blossom Hill Road, your closest full-service grocery option will be Gus's starting in 2027. If you're closer to Los Gatos-Almaden Road, you're already shopping at the bigger Whole Foods. Either way, the corner you drive past on errands is not going to look the way it did in 2025, and it's not going to look the way it did in early 2026 either. It's going to look like a shopping center with two grocery brands' worth of history layered into one small stretch of Los Gatos Boulevard, plus a few thousand square feet of something still to be decided.

Moore said it well when the new Whole Foods was still under construction: Los Gatos has always evolved while protecting the things that make the town special, and this particular corner isn't replacing a historic building or changing downtown. It's just proving that even a town that guards its small-town feel this closely still finds room for two grocery stores, a Tesla showroom, and whatever ends up filling that last 4,000 square feet.

Keep an eye on that leftover space. Whoever leases it next will tell you something about what Los Gatos thinks it's missing.

If you're the kind of person who tracks a town this closely, whether it's a grocery store or the next street you might call home, that's exactly the conversation Renovato & Co. likes to have. Let's Begin.