Walk into The CAMP or across Bristol Street to The LAB Anti-Mall this month and the parking lot will tell you something the storefronts haven't caught up to advertising yet. Both campuses are mid-reset, and the shape of that reset is not what a shopping center usually looks like when it's filling vacancies. Nobody is bringing in one big replacement tenant. They're doing the opposite: chopping the available space into smaller pieces and filling it with more businesses than were there before.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live anywhere between Mesa Verde and the 405-Bristol interchange and treat this stretch as a regular stop. The reset isn't a leasing story. It's a bet that Costa Mesa's two most recognizable independent-retail campuses hold their identity better with six small tenants than with one big one, and the evidence for that bet is sitting in a city planning file, a trade press interview, and a restaurant seating chart.
What actually changed at The LAB
The LAB's anchor space, the old Urban Outfitters footprint at 2930 Bristol Street, sat as one large box for years. When Urban Outfitters decided to leave rather than downsize, ownership didn't backfill it with another national name. Linda Sadeghi, who leads The LAB and designed the original 1993 concept, told the Orange County Business Journal that the space is being carved into new footprints running from 600 to 1,500 square feet, a range she described as the sweet spot for smaller, independent tenants, with one larger slot set aside for a full-service eatery. Six new stores were planned for the reworked space.
That math matters more than it sounds. One national retailer's footprint is becoming six or more small ones. The small-format instinct is already visible elsewhere on the property too. Fleuria Romantic Bookstore held its grand opening at The LAB on June 13, an Airstream trailer selling curated fiction, small enough that the original Fleuria book truck rolled in just for opening day so both formats could sit side by side for the occasion. It is the kind of tenant that fits a 600-square-foot slot and would look lost in a former big box.
The LAB's founding idea, Little American Business, is the same one it opened with in 1993. What's different in 2026 is that ownership is actively re-fighting for that identity on a piece of ground that could have gone to another chain and didn't.
A cat lounge with a legal capacity limit
Across the street at The CAMP, the clearest evidence of the same instinct isn't a leasing decision. It's a government filing.
Purrs in Paradise, Costa Mesa's first cat lounge, went before the city's Planning Commission on November 10, 2025. The commission voted 7 to 0 to approve a conditional use permit for the business at 2981 Bristol Street, Suite B3, a 27,191-square-foot parcel with 28 parking spaces. The approval came with conditions that read like they were written for a business trying to stay small on purpose: no more than 12 guests inside the cat lounge at once, no more than 15 adoptable cats on site, and no overnight staff, with cats kenneled and monitored by camera after hours. Founders Ben and Michelle Lioe partnered with Friends of Normie, an Orange County foster rescue, to run the adoption side of the operation alongside the retail-facing lounge.
That's not the profile of a business chasing volume. It's a business the city and the operators both agreed should stay capped, and it fits neatly next to a matcha bar and a bookstore Airstream rather than a discount retailer trying to move units.
Why a Palm Springs restaurant chose 105 seats instead of a bigger room
The clearest version of this pattern outside city hall paperwork is Maleza, the Baja and Mexico City-inspired restaurant TMC Hospitality is bringing to The CAMP from its original location inside the Drift hotel in Palm Springs. TMC cofounder and CEO Philip Bates told Nation's Restaurant News that the Palm Springs restaurant stopped behaving like a hotel amenity years ago and earned an identity of its own, which is why Costa Mesa is getting a standalone version rather than a scaled-up one. The new location is built for about 105 seats, intentionally sized as an intimate, purpose-built restaurant rather than a bigger room chasing higher covers. Executive chef Marco Arreguín, who previously ran the kitchen at Taco Maria in Costa Mesa during its Michelin-starred run, leads the menu, which draws on Mexico City ingredients: housemade moles and tortillas, a raw bar with hamachi aguachile, and large-format proteins meant for sharing.
Trade press reporting in July pointed to a late August debut. As of this writing, Maleza's own site still reads "coming soon," so the exact opening date remains the one variable on this whole corridor nobody has nailed down yet. Watch for it rather than plan around a specific weekend.
Where things actually stand
| Business | Location | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Fleuria Romantic Bookstore | The LAB, 2930 Bristol St | Open, grand opening held June 13, 2026 |
| Daydrift | The CAMP, 2937 Bristol St | Reopened in refreshed café space earlier this year |
| Chafinity Matcha | The CAMP | Open, Japanese tea house concept |
| Purrs in Paradise | The CAMP, 2981 Bristol St Suite B3 | Permit approved, opening pending |
| Maleza | The CAMP, 2937 Bristol St | Late August debut targeted, site still lists "coming soon" |
| LAB anchor subdivision | The LAB, former Urban Outfitters footprint | Additional 600 to 1,500 sq ft slots in staged rollout |
The reset on Bristol Street was never about adding stores. It was about making sure no single tenant could take up enough space to force the block to behave like everyone else's shopping center.
How to actually use the block this fall
If you haven't walked either campus since spring, the practical advice is simple. Grand openings at both properties have clustered on Saturday mornings, and any weekend that a Chafinity or Purrs in Paradise soft launch lands on the same day as the courtyard's maker market will fill the surface lot before 10 a.m. Park on the north end of The CAMP or arrive before 9 if a Saturday matters to you.
Both properties have also said they're staging announcements rather than batch-releasing them. The CAMP entered 2026 with six planned grand openings and has been spacing them out instead of dropping them all at once. The LAB has said the same about its subdivided storefronts. That means the lineup you saw in March isn't the lineup sitting there today, and it won't be the same lineup by December either. Following each campus's own site calendar will get you ahead of a Saturday crowd that's still going by social media.
The whole loop, LAB to CAMP and back, sits inside Costa Mesa's South Bristol Entertainment and Cultural Arts district, walkable in under a mile from the residential streets on either side of Baker. It's built at a pace that assumes you're coming back next Thursday, not driving in once for a single reservation.
The bigger read
Costa Mesa has traded on being the county's original anti-mall for more than three decades. What's happening on this two-block stretch of Bristol Street in 2026 is that identity getting actively defended rather than assumed. A cat lounge capped at 12 humans and 15 cats. A restaurant chain choosing 105 seats over a bigger room. A vacated big box becoming six small ones instead of one new anchor. None of those are accidents of a slow leasing year. They're the same decision made three separate times by three separate operators, and the version of this corridor you'll be walking through by winter is going to look meaningfully different from the one you knew last spring.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor, or in Mesa Verde, Halecrest, or the Eastside, might be worth given how the neighborhood around it keeps evolving, The Annie Clougherty Team knows this stretch of Costa Mesa block by block. Request a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
