Willowbrook is a one-level enclosed mall at State Highway 249 and Farm to Market Road 1960, open since September 1981.
Homart Development, the Sears-related company that built it, gave it three department-store anchors on day one, and the property now spans more than 1.5 million square feet with over 150 stores under one roof.
Sears closed in 2020, and Forever 21 closed in 2025, but the old Sears building did not stay empty.
Round1 opened there, Primark is set to join it on July 16, 2026, and smaller shops like Tous and Doc Popcorn moved into other gaps.
Lord & Taylor's old building came down in 2006, and the site sat empty for years before Nordstrom Rack opened there in 2014.
Other Houston malls, like Northwest Mall and Greenspoint Mall, lost anchors and sat vacant for years before facing much deeper decline.
Willowbrook still has Dillard's, JCPenney, and Macy's on its directory, decades after Sears, Foley's, and Montgomery Ward opened the doors.
Not every Houston-area mall from that era can say that.
Willowbrook Mall opens at a Houston crossroads
Sears, Foley's, and Montgomery Ward were already ringing up sales at Willowbrook Mall three weeks before the rest of the building let anyone in.
By September 2, 1981, all three anchors were open. The enclosed mall around them opened to the public on September 23.
Homart Development Company developed it.
Homart was the shopping-center arm of Sears, Roebuck and Co., so the chain anchoring the mall was also tied to the company behind it.
Architectonics Inc. of Chicago designed the building, and ground had broken back in 1979.
Willowbrook Mall sits at 2000 Willowbrook Mall, at the junction of State Highway 249 and Farm to Market Road 1960, with the stretch of FM 1960 east of Highway 249 now also called Cypress Creek Parkway, in a stretch of northwest Houston that was still mostly semi-rural.
A one-level enclosed regional mall on a crossroads that would soon get much bigger, built for a suburb that hadn't caught up to it yet, with surface parking wrapped around the building on every side.
A tech company grows up next door
Homart planned Willowbrook for a part of the Houston area that still had room to grow, and the growth came fast.
Compaq Computer Corporation was founded in Houston in 1982, a year after the mall opened, and later set up at 20555 SH 249, just a few miles north.
Compaq's expansion and the buildout of the SH 249 corridor brought more office jobs, more nearby development, and heavier traffic to northwest Houston through the 1980s and 1990s.
Willowbrook didn't create any of that growth on its own, but it became the retail center that growth flowed into.
The area wasn't even part of Houston yet.
The city didn't annex Willowbrook until 1993, more than a decade after the mall had already been drawing shoppers from outside its limits.
The mall's original earth-toned interior
Inside, the mall matched its era: dark wood tones, indoor planting, and an earth-toned palette common to shopping centers built in the late 1970s.
Sears occupied a two-level building with its own garden center attached and an arched facade that gave it a distinct exterior identity.
A food court sat near the center of the mall, next to an interior General Cinema movie theater, giving the middle of the building a reason to linger beyond shopping.
Luby's served sit-down meals from the beginning, and Ruby Tuesday and Casa Ole later gave Willowbrook a fuller sit-down restaurant mix.
Walgreens and Oshman's filled out the everyday shopping list, alongside music stores, toy stores, and fashion chains that came standard with a mall this size.
Six anchors in eleven years
Joske's had been part of the original anchor plan, but its store didn't open until July 1983, almost two years after the rest of the mall.
Macy's followed in 1984 with a three-story store of its own, taller than Sears' two-level building and tied into its own mall wing.
JCPenney arrived in 1992, giving Willowbrook its sixth major anchor since opening in 1981.
Three department stores had become six in just over a decade, all anchoring the same enclosed concourse.
New owners, then a brighter mall
Homart sold Willowbrook Mall in 1990, more than a decade after building it, to an investment group for more than $125 million.
The sale ended the Sears/Homart ownership tie to a mall Sears had anchored from day one.
Two years later, the mall got its first major renovation.
The dark, earth-toned interior from 1981 gave way to a brighter, white-toned look, the same year JCPenney moved in.
The renovation changed the look of the entire concourse.
Macy's leaves, and Dillard's moves in
Dillard's had already been in the mall since 1987, when it acquired the Joske's chain and converted the original Joske's store to its own name.
Then Macy's pulled back from several Houston suburban locations in 1997, including Willowbrook.
Dillard's moved out of its original building and into the larger three-story former Macy's store in 1997.
That left the old Joske's and Dillard's building open for a new tenant: Lord & Taylor opened there in 1998.
Dillard's finished a renovation and expansion of its new store around 2001, growing the space by 50 percent.
Montgomery Ward closes, new ownership arrives
Montgomery Ward closed at Willowbrook in March 2001, when the chain liquidated nationwide.
Its building sat empty for two years until Foley's took it over in 2003, using the space for a second Willowbrook store built around men's and furniture departments.
The same year Montgomery Ward closed, General Growth Properties bought the mall for $145 million.
Willowbrook was doing well enough to justify the price: sales stood at $430 per square foot, putting it near the Galleria, Memorial City Mall, and Baybrook Mall among Houston's stronger enclosed centers.
By 2000, Willowbrook ranked third among Houston-area retail developments by net rentable area.
By the mid-2010s, its trade area had grown past 1.1 million people across northwest Houston.
Hotels, restaurants, medical offices, and strip centers grew up around it in the years that followed.
Houston Methodist Willowbrook Hospital and Lone Star College University Park later added more institutional weight nearby, while HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest had already been operating east on FM 1960.
Three years empty, then torn down
Lord & Taylor closed its Willowbrook store in January 2004.
The 122,200-square-foot building sat empty for almost three years before demolition crews took it down in late 2006.
What replaced it was a fraction of the size.
Nordstrom Rack was planned for the cleared pad in 2013 at 38,000 square feet, a third the size of the building it replaced, and opened there in September 2014 alongside a Bar Louie restaurant.
The Foley's name disappears, then GGP files for bankruptcy
Both Foley's stores at Willowbrook, the original building and the 2003 Montgomery Ward replacement, became Macy's in 2006, when Federated Department Stores retired the Foley's name across its chain.
General Growth Properties filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2009, part of a national real estate debt crisis.
Willowbrook kept its doors open and its stores running through the filing.
General Growth also owned or managed several other major Houston malls through the same period, including Baybrook, Deerbrook, and First Colony.
H&M arrives, and the mall gets a makeover
H&M opened at Willowbrook on June 28, 2012, in a store built out to 25,600 square feet.
It was a different kind of fashion draw than the department-store anchors that defined the mall's original 1981 lineup.
General Growth Properties started a larger modernization in 2015.
The main entrance got a two-story clear structure that used the mall's existing height and skylights, and the food court was rebuilt with new seating, tables, and chairs.
New landscaping and hardscape went in around the property.
Zara, Dick's, and a change of ownership
Zara opened at Willowbrook in 2016, the same year Dick's Sporting Goods arrived on October 21.
Dick's chose Willowbrook as one of six stores it opened across Greater Houston that year, alongside Baybrook, Deerbrook, First Colony, The Woodlands, and Parkwest in Katy.
The rollout also brought related Field & Stream and Golf Galaxy stores into the Houston market that year.
Two years later, Brookfield Property Partners acquired GGP, the renamed General Growth Properties.
Willowbrook moved into Brookfield's retail portfolio along with the rest of GGP's malls.
Sears closes after four decades
Sears' closure at Willowbrook was confirmed in February 2020.
The store closed that April, part of the nationwide wave of Sears shutdowns that year.
The building had a separate ownership history by then.
The Sears parcel, listed at 7925 FM 1960 W in closure reports, was owned by Transformco and sat apart from the rest of the Brookfield-owned mall.
It was the same building that opened as an original anchor in 1981.
Its closing left Willowbrook with the largest single vacancy the property had faced in decades.
Forever 21 closes as smaller shops move in
Forever 21 closed at Willowbrook in 2025 after Forever 21's U.S. operator filed for bankruptcy.
The vacated space sat between Nordstrom Rack and the Macy's Men's Store, and no replacement tenant had been named by mid-2025.
Smaller additions filled in around the gap.
Tous, Sunglass Time, Doc Popcorn, and the Sip kiosk all opened in the same stretch, while LensCrafters worked through a remodel of its own store.
By late summer 2025, that stretch of the mall was still a mix of small shops and one unresolved gap.
What Willowbrook Mall looks like in 2026
Round1 opened in part of the former Sears building on December 20, 2025, with more than 100 crane machines, arcade games, bowling lanes, billiards, karaoke, and a food bar.
The buildout cost $7 million and covered 107,000 square feet of the old department store.
The arcade and bowling alley now fill space that spent almost four decades as a department store.
Primark takes the next slice of that same building on July 16, 2026.
The 30,000-square-foot store is Primark's second Houston-area location after Katy Mills and its seventh in Texas.
The mall also added a new rule this year.
It started with a temporary test on May 2 and May 9, when visitors 17 and under needed a parent or supervising adult 21 or older with them on Saturdays after 2 p.m., with one adult allowed to watch up to four minors.
Officers checked IDs for anyone who looked 17 or younger, and the policy was later extended.
The property still spans more than 1.5 million square feet of retail space with more than 150 stores, still one level, still ringed by surface parking built for cars rather than foot traffic.
Dillard's, JCPenney, and Macy's still anchor the mall's original department-store identity.
Apple, LEGO, lululemon, Sephora, and Chick-fil-A now round out the concourse.
Primark is scheduled to open its doors at Willowbrook Mall on July 16, 2026.
