If you swung into University Park Village for a coffee run sometime in the past year and came out slightly disoriented, you weren't imagining it. The Apple Store isn't where you left it. Freebird's boot wall is gone. And the Pottery Barn you've been driving past since before your kids started at TCU just packed up for the other side of University Drive.
None of this is decline. It's the busiest stretch of turnover this shopping center has seen in years, and if you live in Colonial or University West and treat this corner of South University Drive as your default errand run, it's worth knowing exactly what moved where and what's still to come.
The store you can't find is one door down, not gone
Start with Apple, because it's the domino that tipped everything else. The Apple Store that opened at University Park Village back in 2008 spent 17 years in the same spot before resigning its lease and relocating within the center to a bigger footprint at 1540 S. University Dr., next door to Eatzi's. The new store carries Apple's newest interior design, and Fort Worth Report reported it as the first location in Texas to get the updated look. That's not a small detail for a metro this size. It means Apple picked this specific center, over every other mall in Dallas-Fort Worth, to debut a format the rest of the state hasn't seen yet.
The move also explains why the north side of the shopping center looked like a construction zone for most of last year. Apple's old space, along with the vacancy left when western-wear retailer Freebird closed in the summer of 2025, handed the property roughly two large, connected footprints to refill at the same time.
What actually took over the old Apple corner
The answer split in two. Starbucks expanded into part of the old Apple footprint, growing its dining space in what had been backroom and stockroom area. Right next to it, activewear brand Vuori opened its first Fort Worth store, taking over the rest of the old Apple corner. Construction on the Vuori buildout wrapped in January and the Starbucks expansion was projected to finish by June, and by mid-May a trade write-up confirmed Vuori as fully open and already the center's sixth activewear tenant, joining Lululemon, Athleta, Free People Movement, Fabletics and Nike. Fort Worth shoppers who wanted Vuori before this had to drive to Southlake, Dallas, or Plano. Now it's a five-minute stop on the same visit as your Nike run or your Saturday coffee.
That's six activewear brands under one roof, on a property that didn't have a single one a decade ago. If you've noticed the leggings-to-loafers ratio at UPV shifting over the past few years, that's not a feeling. It's the tenant mix.
Pottery Barn's move wasn't a retreat, it was an upgrade for the corridor
Pottery Barn didn't leave the market. It crossed University Drive to Westbend, moving into the space that used to be Market by Macy's, and it brought its sister brand West Elm along for the ride, in a combined 22,126-square-foot space. West Elm's arrival matters on its own. The brand had a Fort Worth location on West 7th Street that opened in 2017 and closed a couple of years later, so this marks its return to the city for the first time in years, and its 10th location in Texas overall. The new store opened this spring on the timeline Trademark Property Company announced back in the summer of 2025, and with the deal in place Westbend's retail lineup reached full occupancy.
For anyone who shops at both centers regularly, the net effect is that the University Drive corridor didn't lose a home-furnishings anchor. It gained a second one, directly across the street, inside a development that already includes Bluemercury, Warby Parker, Shake Shack, and Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. If your errand list used to be UPV for Pottery Barn and a separate trip somewhere else for West Elm, that's now one stop.
The two spaces that sat empty for the better part of a year
Here's where it got interesting for anyone paying close attention. Pottery Barn's exit and Freebird's closure left two sizable vacancies at UPV at almost the same time, and neither filled quickly. Local retail-watchers on the Fort Worth Architecture forum spent months trading guesses, floating names like Aritzia, Vineyard Vines, and a possible return of Banana Republic, largely based on which brands already cluster at UPV's peer centers in Southlake and at The Shops at Clearfork.
As one TCU fashion merchandising department chair put it when asked about the churn:
"Shopping malls like University Park Village have to cater to their customers in their area in order to succeed. For this one, the brands reflect those of TCU students and families in the Colonial neighborhood."
That framing turned out to be the right one. The center didn't backfill with a discount tenant to plug the hole fast. It waited for names that fit the existing lineup.
Aritzia and Coach, and what the price tags tell you
The wait ended this May. Building permits confirmed two new tenants now under construction at University Park Village: Coach and Aritzia. The scale of the two projects tells you something about how each brand plans to show up. Coach's buildout is budgeted at roughly $582,000, with completion targeted for October 2026, a relatively quick, contained fit-out for a brand adding a single storefront to its existing DFW footprint. Aritzia's buildout, by contrast, is budgeted at roughly $5.7 million, with completion targeted for March 2027, a much longer runway and a much larger investment, consistent with a retailer building a flagship-style presence rather than a standard mall unit.
Here's a rough timeline of what's already open and what's still on the way:
- Vuori, in the former Apple space next to the expanded Starbucks: open now.
- Pottery Barn and West Elm, at Westbend across University Drive: open now.
- Coach, in one of the two long-vacant UPV spaces: targeting October 2026.
- Aritzia, in the other long-vacant UPV space: targeting March 2027.
If your household has been holding off on a Pottery Barn order because you assumed the store had closed, it hasn't. It just moved a few hundred feet and picked up a sister store on the way. If you've been wondering what's finally going in where Freebird and the old Pottery Barn used to be, you now have two names and two dates to watch for, rather than a forum thread full of guesses.
What this means walking in this fall
The short version for anyone who treats this stretch of University Drive as part of their weekly routine: the center isn't thinning out, it's trading up. Every departure this year has been replaced by something with a bigger footprint, a longer construction timeline, or a bigger buildout budget than what it replaced. That's a different story than the empty storefronts might have suggested if you only drove past without reading the permit filings.
Colonial and University West residents already know this neighborhood works because it sits within walking distance of TCU, Colonial Country Club, and a shopping center that keeps reinvesting in itself rather than coasting on the same tenants for another decade. For more on what else defines the neighborhood, our Colonial and University West guide covers the rest of what makes this pocket of Fort Worth work the way it does.
If you're a longtime owner here and any of this retail momentum has you thinking about what your home is worth in a neighborhood that keeps investing in itself, the team at Duwe-Olsen Real Estate Group knows this stretch of Fort Worth block by block. Reach out anytime to talk through what's changing in Colonial, on University Drive, or anywhere else in your corner of the city.
