On Williams Field Road in Gilbert, Arizona, sits SanTan Village, a regional shopping center whose stores face outdoor streets. Its shopping streets run beside the Loop 202 Santan Freeway.
The center opened in October 2007. The other big malls nearby were enclosed, so SanTan Village set itself apart by putting its stores outside, along paseos and open-air courtyards.
Several of the center's first restaurants are still open on the property. Brio isn't. It opened there in June 2008 and had closed by September of this year, after 18 years on the site.
The streets are still outdoors, and the storefronts along them keep changing hands. A Tesla showroom opened in one of them in April, and a Reformed Pilates studio has taken another.
Planning an outdoor mall for the desert
In January 1999, the Gilbert Town Council rezoned about 523 acres of rural residential land for commercial use.
Westcor, a developer that built regional malls alongside smaller retail and mixed-use property, would go on to develop SanTan Village there.
Its plan put a mall at the northern end and left the rest for a district that would eventually hold close to 3 million square feet of shops, restaurants, offices, homes, and hotels.
The mall itself would take about 120 acres, under a quarter of the land. And it would be outdoors.
Chandler Fashion Center to the west and Superstition Springs Center to the north were enclosed malls competing for the same shoppers, and SanTan Village set itself apart from both by putting its stores along open-air streets, paseos, and courtyards.
That meant building shade into the plan.
The buildings were turned north-south so they would shade the walks during the day, while other parts of the design used shade structures, fans, misting systems, water features, and evaporative cooling towers.
The parking was another matter.
When construction started in February 2006, the plan had no garage, only surface lots wrapped around the site and cut through it.
SanTan Village opens in stages, 2007 to 2009
Harkins Theatres opened first, in March 2007, seven months ahead of the rest of the mall.
The main opening came on October 26, 2007, when Dillard's, Apple, and more than 85 specialty stores opened around the theater.
SanTan Village is an open-air regional shopping center at 2218 E. Williams Field Road in Gilbert, Arizona, beside the Loop 202 Santan Freeway.
It opened under that name as an outdoor mall, and it still runs as one.
Big stores kept arriving through 2008. Barnes & Noble brought a two-level bookstore and cafe, an air-conditioned stop between the outdoor streets.
Dick's Sporting Goods and Best Buy joined it, while plans called for up to 13 restaurants that year. Brio Tuscan Grille opened in June.
Macy's came last, in March 2009.
Its 120,000-square-foot prototype spread the entire sales floor across one level, a format Macy's designed for open-air centers.
Shoppers could reach every department without using an escalator or elevator.
With Macy's open, the lineup of big stores planned in the early years was complete.
The big stores stayed, the chains left
Those big stores stayed. Seven of them were still open in 2026: Dillard's, Macy's, Harkins, Dick's, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, and Apple.
Some early smaller names held on too, like American Eagle, Buckle, Coach, and Blue Wasabi. The churn happened in the rest of the storefronts.
Coldwater Creek, the Disney Store, Eddie Bauer, J. Jill, lucy, Charlotte Russe, Z Gallerie, and Ann Taylor all signed on while the center was being built, and none of the eight is on the 2026 directory.
Forever 21, at 2268 E. Williams Field Road, has closed too.
The center stayed close to full through the churn. Occupancy was 96.5 percent at the end of 2015 and 96.3 percent at the end of 2019.
The second decade's clearest change came at the corner of Williams Field Road and SanTan Village Parkway.
Nordstrom announced a Nordstrom Rack there in November 2017, and it opened on September 27, 2018, at 26,000 square feet, another large store facing Williams Field Road alongside Dillard's and Macy's.
HomeGoods later opened on the same frontage, at 2070 E. Williams Field Road.
Shade on the plans, pavement on the ground
The shade in the plan went into the streets between the stores, where the buildings had been turned to cover the walks.
The lots around them had been laid out for cars.
In 2021 Gilbert measured the wider SanTan Village commerce area for its shade and streetscape plan, and more than 60 percent of it was paved parking.
Tree canopy covered about 7 percent.
Some of the trees that were there had been pruned too heavily to shade anything. The town's shade plan made parking lots a target for more shade.
Separate road projects around SanTan Village have focused on traffic flow and congestion.
Pilates, escape rooms, and a Tesla showroom
On April 11, 2026, Tesla held a grand opening for a showroom at SanTan Village, on shopping streets whose 2007 lineup had run heavily to national apparel chains.
Many of its neighbors didn't sell clothes either. The original plan called for about 130 retailers.
In September 2026, the center listed well over 100 businesses, and the list included One Medical Group, Team Orthodontics, LaserAway, Madison Reed, and a Reformed Pilates studio, plus Escapology, Kids Empire, and Slimeatory for families.
The clothing stores that remain lean toward newer names.
ALO and OFFLINE by Aerie arrived in the 2024-2025 wave, joining lululemon, Athleta, and Tecovas, while Madewell was listed as coming soon; local shops like Grace Records and The Jaded Finch took space among the chains.
Food changed the same way, with Shake Shack, Jeni's Ice Creams, and Dog Haus arriving by 2026.
Brio went the other direction. By September 2026, it had closed, 18 years after it opened.
A second Dick's across from SanTan Village
The land around the mall is still filling in.
Construction on Northside at SanTan Village started in July 2024 on about 20 acres north of the mall, between Williams Field and Ray roads, with restaurants, shops, a hotel, and offices planned.
Perry's Steakhouse & Grille opened there on June 8, 2026, the chain's first restaurant in Arizona.
Signature at SanTan Village is going up to the west, on 30 acres at the northwest corner of SanTan Village Parkway and Williams Field Road.
It was still under construction in September 2026, with a Whole Foods Market and a Dick's House of Sport in its first phase.
The House of Sport is planned at 119,400 square feet, nearly the size of the Macy's that finished the mall in 2009.
It sits directly across the parkway from the mall, where the existing Dick's Sporting Goods is still open.
The roads have changed with the district.
From July 30 through late August 2026, Gilbert restricted turns at Williams Field Road and Market Street while it made intersection improvements, and drivers were sent in through the SanTan Village Parkway entrance.
The mall itself still runs outdoors, on about 1.2 million square feet, and it takes about 9.3 million visits a year.
Its seasonal splash pad near Vans and Build-A-Bear stays open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and shuts for an hour at 4 each afternoon for cleaning.
The Gilbert Turkey Trot, a Thanksgiving event that keeps coming back to the property, is set for this November in the space south of Macy's.
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