August 6, 2026
Walk into the courtyard on a Saturday in late July and the fire pit still smells like it did in 1998. Kids are eating Reddi Chick tenders off paper plates, someone is reading in a folding chair outside Diesel, and the barn-red clapboards look, from ten feet away, unchanged. Look at the tenant signs, though, and the map has shifted. Two of the highest-visibility storefronts now belong to international brands that treat 26th Street as their Los Angeles landing pad, not their neighborhood errand run. The Mart is doing something interesting in 2026: it is letting resortwear labels in the front door while quietly protecting the village programming in the courtyard. Both moves are deliberate, and if you live within walking distance, the balance is worth watching.
For most of the last decade, new leases at the Mart tended to be smaller LA-native brands or short-run pop-ups. This summer broke that pattern with two full boutiques in a row, both from outside the city.
The first was Orlebar Brown. The British resortwear label opened its Brentwood Country Mart location on June 12, 2026, marking the company's fourth California store and joining boutiques in Beverly Hills, Newport Beach and Montecito. The Chanel-owned brand is best known for tailored swim shorts, linen shirts and Italian-made resortwear, and the Brentwood shop carries the latest collection across swim, linens and outerwear. If you have been to Montecito's Coast Village Road, the tenant logic is familiar. Orlebar Brown chases the same customer who is already renting a house in Malibu for August.
The second was Varley. The Brentwood Country Mart secured the first Los Angeles County location for the women's contemporary brand, followed shortly by the Orlebar Brown opening. The two boutiques join a Varley store at Fashion Island in Newport Beach as the brand's only California stores. The launch itself was staged as a courtyard event on Saturday, July 11, from noon to 3 PM, with rosé, strawberries and cream, and a Wimbledon-styled celebration of Varley's arrival. Note the choice. A Fashion Island store opens with a ribbon cutting. A Brentwood Country Mart store opens with strawberries in the courtyard because the courtyard is the asset the landlord is selling.
If you have not been paying attention to the Mart's programming calendar, the pace has picked up. The events schedule for summer 2026 is not marketing filler. It is what keeps the tenant mix from tipping fully into resort retail.
Recurring and dated programming in the courtyard and at Diesel this summer includes:
Take a step back. The two new boutiques are national and international. The programming is hyperlocal. Story Time is not there to sell resort shorts. It is there so that the parents who come in for Story Time still think of the Mart as their Wednesday, which is what makes the courtyard worth a Varley signing on Saturday. The economics only work if both audiences show up.
The reason a resortwear brand pays 26th Street rent is that the neighbors are already doing the work. Farmshop still runs the lunch rush and, in the early afternoon, empties out into the kind of quiet where a laptop is welcome. Reddi Chick is still the reason a fifth grader will agree to a Saturday errand. Sweet Rose Creamery, Edelweiss Candy, Toy Crazy and the small carousel keep the family flow moving through the food courtyard, and Diesel, A Bookstore anchors the reading crowd on the north side.
On the retail side, the pre-2026 boutique mix, including Jenni Kayne, goop's Brentwood outpost, Broken English and Poppy, sets the aesthetic ceiling the newer tenants are underwriting. The Mart itself is a 30,000-square-foot center at 225 26th Street, first opened on November 18, 1948, with barn-like architecture by Rowland Crawford and its signature outdoor dining area around a central fire pit. Since J.S. Rosenfield acquired it in 2003, the property has been restored architecturally, with original offerings such as the post office, food courtyard, barber shop, toy store and shoe repair shop reinstated alongside a rotating slate of pop-up shops. That combination, a 1948 shell plus a curated rotation, is exactly the pitch a brand like Varley or Orlebar Brown pays for.
The Mart's competitive edge in 2026 is not its rent roll. It is the courtyard programming that produces the crowd the rent roll depends on.
If you are a resident and you have not stitched the Mart into a Sunday morning routine lately, the current rhythm is worth trying.
The two locations are close enough that a stroller can do the loop, but different enough in tenant mix that the visit does not feel repetitive. The farmers market handles produce and prepared food. The Mart handles the sit-down meal, the bookstore, the toy run and the resortwear window a certain kind of neighbor is not going to admit they looked in.
Here is the pattern to watch. In the last decade, the Mart added tenants that read as boutique-LA, brands that a Brentwood shopper might have discovered before their friends in Palo Alto or Denver did. In 2026, the Mart added two brands that will read as familiar to a shopper flying in from London or New York. That is not a downgrade. It is a repositioning. The landlord is betting that a family village and an international resort brand can share a courtyard as long as the courtyard keeps behaving like a family village.
For residents, three things follow. First, the retail center will remain relevant on weekends, which matters for property values within walking radius even if the reader is not selling. Second, weekday parking is going to feel tighter in August than it did in April, because destination shoppers behave differently than errand runners. Third, the next lease to watch is the food side. If a national fast-casual chain shows up in place of Barney's or Frida, the balance has tipped. If the next opening is another owner-operated local, the courtyard model is holding.
For now, the fire pit still smells the same. Bring the kids on Wednesday morning, come back on Saturday afternoon, and treat the two new storefronts as evidence that the address is doing well rather than as a reason to worry it is drifting.
If you own a home nearby and want a candid read on how corridor changes like these are showing up in Brentwood values, or you are thinking about the timing of a sale before the fall market, Team Pinckert is happy to walk the block with you. List Your Home with advisors who have watched this stretch of 26th Street change and hold its shape for more than one cycle.
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