Walk into Sherman Library & Gardens this week and the entrance isn't where you remember it. The main gate has been temporarily relocated to Dahlia Avenue while crews rework parts of the grounds, and if you ask at the desk about lunch, the answer is the same one it's been for months: regular dining service isn't available right now. The café closed, the replacement restaurant is a year out, and in the meantime the gardens are filling the gap with ticketed tea service and a summer art show that's already packing up its centerpiece.
That's the real story of Corona del Mar Village at the end of August 2026. Almost everything visible on a walk down East Coast Highway right now is mid-change: a sixty-year-old institution rebuilding itself, storefronts turning over inside the same four blocks, a restaurant announcement that won't become an actual dinner reservation until fall 2027. The one thing that hasn't moved, hasn't rebranded, and hasn't needed a grand reopening is the farmers market on the corner of Marguerite and Pacific Coast Highway, which has been running every Saturday since 1996. This month, almost everything else in the Village is temporary except the thing nobody advertises.
The gardens are open, but not the way you think
Sherman Library & Gardens was founded in 1966 by Arnold Haskell, who named it for his friend and mentor Moses Hazeltine Sherman. Sixty years later, it's in the middle of what the gardens describe as ongoing improvements throughout the grounds, which is why the Dahlia Avenue entrance is standing in for the usual one and why the property has shifted to seasonal admission pricing for adults and children.
The dining situation is the clearest sign of how far along that rebuild actually is. There's no full food service on-site right now. What exists instead is Hazeltine's Afternoon Tea, a ticketed preview experience built around loose leaf organic tea and a curated menu of savories and pastries, explicitly framed as a glimpse of the restaurant that's supposed to open there in fall 2027. If you want to try it, dates are limited and advance reservations are required. This year's sessions ran in June and July and again in mid-August, and the schedule is already shifting toward fall, with sessions planned around Grandparents Day and a seasonal harvest display before the gardens reset for the holidays.
So the honest read for anyone who assumed Sherman Gardens was a finished, static stop on the CdM circuit: it's currently a construction site with a very good events calendar taped over it, and the payoff (an actual sit-down farm-to-table restaurant) is still more than a year away.
The dog leaving before the show does
The gardens' summer art installation this year is Dog Days of Sherman, six larger-than-life mosaic sculptures by Elizabeth Laul Healey, an artist who splits her roots between Laguna Beach and Corona del Mar and has fabricated more than 250 pieces like these over her career. The exhibit is free with regular garden admission and runs through September 7.
Here's the part that actually matters if you're planning a visit this week. The centerpiece sculpture, a piece called Honey, isn't staying for the full run. She's been selected to appear at Burning Man, which opens on Nevada's playa on August 30, so she has to leave Sherman early to make the trip. That gives anyone who wants a photo with the show's signature piece roughly the next week to get there before she's gone, not the two-plus weeks the official closing date suggests.
The gardens leaned into the timing rather than fighting it, running after-hours Yappy Hours where members could bring leashed dogs in to tour the installation before Honey's send-off. It's a small detail, but it tells you something about how the property is managing its in-between period: instead of waiting quietly for the 2027 restaurant to open, it's stacking short, specific events into the gap.
New storefronts, old rhythm
The retail side of the Village has had its own churn this year, and it's worth naming the specifics rather than waving at "new shops."
- Cozy Earth opened its Corona del Mar flagship at 3600 E. Coast Highway, its second-ever brick-and-mortar location after an initial store in Brentwood. For a bedding and loungewear brand building out its first physical footprint, choosing CdM Village over a larger retail corridor says something about who they think is walking these four blocks.
- Cugini Italia Boutique Market held its grand opening and ribbon cutting on March 20, 2026, adding another specialty grocer to a stretch of highway that already leans hard into small-format, high-quality food shopping.
- The Village's monthly rhythm continues underneath the new openings: on the first Saturday of every month, the Explore CdM shop-local campaign runs sidewalk sales up and down Coast Highway, the kind of low-key merchant event that's been part of the neighborhood's business culture for years, not something built around a single new tenant.
None of this is dramatic on its own. But set next to a sixty-year-old garden mid-renovation and a restaurant timeline stretching into 2027, the retail turnover reads less like random noise and more like a Village that's actively being reshuffled this year, storefront by storefront, while its bigger institutions take their time.
What's actually been there the whole time
Against all of that, the Corona del Mar Certified Farmers Market barely changes, and that's precisely the point. It sets up every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the corner of Marguerite and Pacific Coast Highway, the same corner it's occupied since 1996. It's a certified market, meaning the growers selling there are verified through the state's certified farmers market program, and the stalls run the range you'd expect from a market with three decades of practice: prepared foods, honey, fresh fish, cut flowers, and produce from growers who don't show up at every market in the county.
It doesn't have a renovation timeline. It doesn't have a rebrand. It's not previewing a future version of itself through a ticketed tasting menu. It's just there, every Saturday, the way it's been there for approaching thirty years, while the rest of the Village negotiates its own version of a facelift around it.
Where the day ends
The evening side of CdM has the same old-guard quality as the market, even as the daytime retail shifts underneath it. Five Crowns has run its SideDoor gastropub, an English-style pub built inside the historic property, since 2009. Foretti's has been turning out Neapolitan-certified wood-fired pizza since 2013. Bandera, part of the Hillstone Restaurant Group, still slow-roasts its rotisserie chickens over a hardwood fire the way it always has. These aren't new arrivals chasing a moment. They're fixtures that predate most of what's currently under construction a few blocks away.
That's the actual shape of Corona del Mar Village right now, in late August 2026: a market pushing thirty years on the same corner, a sixty-year-old garden rebuilding itself behind a temporary gate, a handful of national retailers just landing on the same stretch of highway, and a dinner scene that hasn't needed to change in over a decade. If you're going to see Honey before she leaves for the desert, this is the week to do it. Everything else in the Village will still be mid-transition when you get back.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood this closely because you're thinking further ahead, that's a different conversation, and it's one Team Todd has been having with Corona del Mar homeowners for years. Let's Do This Right.
