On the morning of Wednesday, August 26, hundreds of people showed up at The Lakes at Thousand Oaks before the doors even opened. The line ran the length of the storefront, down the block, and past South Conejo School Road. It was for a grocery store. Specifically, it was for Erewhon, the Los Angeles chain famous for celebrity smoothies and organic produce priced like jewelry, opening its first location outside Los Angeles County in the space where Lassens Natural Food & Vitamins used to be.
A year earlier, the loudest voices in this exact shopping center said this wouldn't work here. They had a petition, a Facebook group, and a spot on the city council's agenda to prove it. What actually happened on opening day tells a different story about what this corner of Thousand Oaks Boulevard has become.
The Store Everyone Assumed Would Stay
Lassens had been part of The Lakes since 2015, when it relocated from a smaller spot at Skyline Plaza a few blocks east. The brand itself goes back further. Hilmar and Oda Lassen opened their first natural foods store in Camarillo in 1971, and the chain grew into a fixture across Ventura County, with locations in Oxnard, Simi Valley, and Ventura in addition to Thousand Oaks.
The Thousand Oaks store closed on May 1, 2025. A sign on the door thanked customers and explained that Caruso, the property owner, had chosen not to extend the lease. Caruso is not a small landlord making a one-off decision. Founded by Rick Caruso, the company also owns The Promenade at Westlake and The Village at Moorpark, which means the same firm shapes retail decisions across three different Conejo Valley shopping centers, not just this one.
A Petition, a City Council Meeting, and One Prediction
Thousand Oaks resident Lauri Kamiel found out her regular grocery stop was closing the same way most shoppers did, by reading the sign on the door. She started a Facebook group called SaveLassensTO that quickly grew past 100 members, and a companion Change.org petition that eventually collected more than 530 signatures. Kamiel was one of two residents who spoke against the change at the Thousand Oaks City Council meeting on April 8, 2025.
Her argument wasn't just sentimental. It was about fit. She told the council that Erewhon's price point made sense in a place like Calabasas, but for Thousand Oaks, in her words, "that culture is not prevalent here."
City Manager Drew Powers told the council the city had no authority over private lease negotiations, and economic development manager Haider Alawami offered to help Lassens search the city's database of vacant properties for a new home. As of this writing, no relocation has been announced.
The prediction embedded in Kamiel's testimony was specific: Thousand Oaks, unlike Calabasas or the Fairfax District, doesn't have the income profile or the appetite to support a store built around twenty-dollar smoothies. That's a testable claim. Opening day tested it.
What Showed Up Instead
The store that opened on August 26 wasn't a quiet soft launch. It drew a line down the block on a Wednesday morning, in a shopping center about five miles from the Cal Lutheran University campus, for a grocery store's grand opening. Erewhon's Thousand Oaks location became the company's fourteenth store overall and its first anywhere outside Los Angeles County, ahead of planned openings in Costa Mesa and Downtown Los Angeles.
The opening-day details leaned into the local tie-in rather than away from it:
- A Thousand Oaks Steak Sandwich, made exclusively for this location
- An "Amidst The Oaks" smoothie with ginger, herbs, pineapple, and raw honey, with proceeds supporting the Manna Conejo Valley Food Bank
- Limited-run gift bags, fresh flowers from Flower Truck LA, and first access to store-exclusive apparel for early arrivals
None of that erases what Lassens meant to the people who shopped there for a decade, and none of it settles the debate over whether a thirty-dollar bag of ice or a premium smoothie belongs on Thousand Oaks Boulevard. But it does complicate the specific claim that was made at the council meeting. The forecast was that this town wouldn't show up for this store. The town showed up anyway, in numbers large enough to spill past the block.
The Design Choice Nobody Expected
One detail got less attention than the smoothie menu but says more about how the company read the room. Erewhon's usual look, the one shoppers know from Fairfax and Venice, is glass and steel, unmistakably Los Angeles. The Thousand Oaks store departs from that. It's built with a timber-and-stone lodge-style exterior, a design choice the company has described as inspired by its new Ventura County surroundings rather than imported wholesale from L.A.
It's a small signal, but it's the kind of signal that tends to matter more to the people who actually live near a shopping center than to the people writing about it from a distance. A store that changes its own architecture to match a place is making a different bet than a store that assumes the place will adapt to it.
What Two Lakes and 250-Year-Old Oaks Still Look Like
Whatever changes at the storefront level, the property itself hasn't changed shape. The Lakes at Thousand Oaks is a 7.5-acre center built around two lakes, a children's playground, and rose gardens, and its native oak trees, some more than 250 years old, were left undisturbed during the original construction. It sits directly next to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, which is part of why the developer has always described it as a gathering point rather than a standard retail strip.
Each winter, one of the lakes gets turned into an outdoor ice rink, which the property's owner has called Ventura County's only outdoor skating rink. Whether you're picking up groceries, walking the loop around the water with a stroller, or timing a coffee run around a performance next door, the physical bones of this place haven't moved. The turnover is happening inside one storefront, not across the whole property.
What This Actually Means If You Shop at The Lakes
If you were a Lassens regular, the hot bar and the familiar staff are gone, and that loss is real. If you've been curious about Erewhon without wanting to drive to Calabasas or the Valley, it's now five minutes away, open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Either way, the more interesting story here isn't about which grocery chain is "right" for Thousand Oaks. It's that a specific, publicly stated prediction about this community's spending habits didn't hold up against what actually happened when the doors opened.
That's worth remembering the next time a new business announcement rolls through a shopping center you've been going to for years. The comment section forms fast. The turnout is the part that actually tells you something.
If you're the kind of person who reads a story like this because you're genuinely curious about how this corner of the Conejo Valley is changing, and not because you're shopping for a house, that's exactly who we write these for. But if a shift like this ever does get you wondering what it means for your own street, whether in Thousand Oaks or across Ventura County, Juliana Lisheski and the team at CallVenturaHome are always glad to talk it through. Discover the Ventura life, one neighborhood story at a time.
