Drive past The Avenue West Cobb on Dallas Highway most weekday mornings and you'll see people walking in and out of BODYBAR Pilates in gym clothes at 8 a.m., long before Talbots or Sunglass Hut ever open their doors. Three storefronts down, where Pier 1 Imports and Charming Charlie used to sit, there's a fenced-off shell that's quietly becoming something bigger than either of those stores ever was. The mix at this shopping center has been shifting for more than a year now, and if you've noticed more yoga mats and fewer shopping bags in the parking lot, you're not imagining it.
The center isn't dying. It's being rebuilt around a different kind of business, one that gets you to come back three times a week instead of once a season.
A Discounted Sale That Explains the Strategy
The Avenue West Cobb has been open since 2003, a 260,000-square-foot, 27.6-acre outdoor center on Dallas Highway anchored by Barnes & Noble. Last fall, an affiliate of Acadia Realty Trust, a New York-based REIT that operates properties in 65 cities, bought the property for $62.5 million. PGIM Real Estate, the seller, had paid $81.3 million for the same center back in 2006. That's nearly a 23 percent drop over almost two decades, and it lines up with what longtime shoppers already knew: occupancy had been sliding for years, with a run of national chains, Pier 1, Charming Charlie, Simply Mac, all closing out of their spaces after separate bankruptcies.
Acadia's plan for that gap wasn't to cut rent and wait for another mall retailer to sign a lease. It was to bring in a fitness tenant big enough to anchor the empty block on its own. In December 2025, the Cobb County zoning commission voted 5 to 0 to approve extended weekend hours for the property, specifically to help land what the applicant's attorney described as an upscale fitness facility that would occupy a significant portion of the vacant space. That's a shopping center rewriting its own operating hours to keep one tenant happy, which tells you how much weight the deal is carrying.
What's Actually Moving Into the Empty Storefronts
The tenant is Club Studio, a boutique fitness brand under Fitness International, the same parent company behind LA Fitness. Club Studio is positioned as a premium alternative, closer to Life Time than to a standard gym membership. The West Cobb location is planned to combine the old Pier 1, Charming Charlie, and Simply Mac spaces into one footprint, with a lap pool, a basketball court, a cycling studio, a boxing studio, reformer Pilates, a steam room, a sauna, cryotherapy, and a superfood cafe called Beaming. For comparison, the only other Club Studio in metro Atlanta, in Brookhaven, lists monthly pricing between $189 and $249. Nobody has confirmed West Cobb pricing yet, but if the Brookhaven numbers hold anywhere close, this won't be a budget option.
Construction bid documents suggest the space is entering its build-out phase now, and reporting from earlier this summer put a realistic opening sometime in 2027. That's a longer runway than most retail news, but the direction is already visible in what's opened around it.
Here's the wellness cluster that's formed at The Avenue over the past year, most of it well before Club Studio ever broke ground:
| Tenant | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| BODYBAR Pilates | Reformer Pilates studio | Opened summer 2025 |
| BLENDED Smoothie & Juice Bar | Juice and smoothie bar | Opened summer 2025 |
| Hammer & Nails | Men's grooming, hair and nails | Opened summer 2025 |
| StretchLab | Assisted stretching studio | Currently operating |
| Vera Whole Health | Primary care and wellness clinic | Currently operating |
| Club Studio | Premium gym with pool, cryotherapy, boxing | Under construction, targeting 2027 |
That's six wellness or fitness businesses at one shopping center, several of them already running for over a year before the anchor gym is even built. This wasn't a single tenant decision. It's a pattern, and it started before Acadia even owned the property.
The Food Side Filled In Too, Just More Quietly
While the fitness cluster has gotten the attention, the dining lineup at The Avenue has kept moving without much fanfare. Ted's Montana Grill has been a fixture at the center for years, and The Peach Cobbler Factory now shows up on the property's own tenant directory as an active store, open daily from noon into the evening. Walk-On's Sports Bistreaux was announced as a food and beverage tenant for the center as well, joining a lineup that already includes Gibney's Tavern, Otter's Chicken, and Queen Tea.
None of this required the same zoning fight as the gym. Restaurants have always turned over at shopping centers. What's different is that the new food tenants are landing in the same footprint as the new fitness tenants, so the center now reads less like a place you go to buy something and more like a place you go to spend two or three hours doing something, a workout, a smoothie, a Pilates class, dinner after.
The Events Calendar Hasn't Changed, and That's the Point
For everything shifting in the tenant mix, the center's community calendar has stayed remarkably steady. Three fixtures show up every year, and they're worth knowing if you live nearby and haven't been to one yet:
- Paws Fest, a dog-focused weekend with DockDogs jumping shows, local vendors, live music, and food trucks. It's become enough of an annual draw that the center posts a full recap video afterward.
- A seasonal fashion night with J.Crew, where the store hosts a runway-style show in partnership with the center, complete with a community shopping discount and volunteer models pulled from the neighborhood.
- The Fall Festival on Halloween, an annual tradition of store-to-store trick-or-treating from 4 to 6 p.m., with costumed characters, a magician, face painting, and a balloon artist who has built a Guinness World Record-sized balloon sculpture at past events. The center's marketing team has called it a Marietta community favorite that kicks off the rest of the year's holiday programming.
These events haven't needed reinvention because they were never the problem. The retail mix was. And that's really the story here: a shopping center that built its identity twenty years ago around browsing and buying is now betting its next chapter on things you do with your body, not things you carry out to your car.
What This Means If You Live Near Dallas Highway
If you shop, work out, or just cut through The Avenue on your way somewhere else, the next twelve months will look different depending on which storefront you're watching. The Pilates studio, the juice bar, and the stretch lab are already part of your routine or easy to add to it. The gym is still a year or two out, and its price point, if it tracks Brookhaven, will put it well above what most West Cobb residents are used to paying for a membership. The restaurants will keep rotating the way restaurants always do. And the Fall Festival will happen on October 31st, same as it has every year, whether or not the Pier 1 space has a roof on it by then.
None of this is a reason to buy or sell a house. It's just what's actually happening at the shopping center most of West Cobb already treats as its own backyard, explained by someone who's watched Cobb County change one storefront at a time for a long time.
If you're weighing a move near this corridor, or just want to talk through what a shifting retail mix like this tends to mean for a neighborhood over the long run, Stephanie Turner Lee knows this stretch of Dallas Highway as well as anyone selling homes in West Cobb. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
