Drive past 413 N. Milwaukee Ave any time between 2023 and this past June and you'd have seen the same thing: a dark, boarded storefront the size of a football field, sitting empty while everything around it kept filling in. Down the road at the Hawthorn Mall outlots, one restaurant after another was breaking ground. A few blocks over, a national sandwich chain was choosing Vernon Hills for a location it had only ever put in downtown Chicago. Meanwhile, the old Bed Bath & Beyond box just sat there, quiet, for three straight years.
That gap tells you something the restaurant openings alone don't. Vernon Hills was never short on retail appetite. It was short on a tenant big enough to take on 100,000 square feet at once. Everything else that filled in around that empty box did so in bites of 3,000 to 11,000 square feet. The box needed something built at a completely different scale, and until this year, nothing showed up that fit.
What actually closed, and when
The Bed Bath & Beyond at 413 N. Milwaukee Ave wasn't a local casualty. It went dark as part of the chain's nationwide bankruptcy wind-down, when the retailer's 2023 closure list included Vernon Hills alongside stores in Gurnee, Kildeer, Schaumburg and more than a dozen other Illinois locations. The Vernon Hills store was one of the larger footprints in that portfolio, which is exactly why it sat vacant longer than most of the smaller strip-mall spaces that turned over quickly elsewhere.
A box that size rules out almost every retailer looking for a fast, cheap entry into a new market. It's too big for a fast-casual chain, too specific in its loading and refrigeration needs for most soft-goods retailers, and too expensive to sit half-used. Whoever eventually took it would need a business built around occupying that much space on purpose.
The tenant that finally fit
That tenant turned out to be Farmer's Best Market, a family-owned grocer that opened its doors in the space this past June. It's the company's third location, after two smaller stores in Chicago and Northlake, and by a wide margin its biggest. Owner Nick Merikas described the concept plainly at the grand opening: "We have everything the neighborhood wants and then some. We're like a fresh market on steroids," he told the Daily Herald.
The store leans into an international and produce-forward format rather than trying to be a straight replacement for a national chain. Inside the repurposed Bed Bath & Beyond footprint, shoppers now find:
- An extensive fresh produce section
- Large meat and prepared foods departments
- A European bakery
- A sushi station
- A wide mix of international grocery items
The village's community development director, Andrew Jennings, framed the opening less as a single store and more as a signal about what that corner of Milwaukee Avenue can support. Filling a box that size, he said, "provides flexibility for operators, comfort for shoppers and fills a big gap in town." Merikas said the store currently employs about 120 people, with plans to hire roughly 80 more, a hiring number that only makes sense once you've walked the aisles and realized how much square footage there is to staff.
Meanwhile, a mile away, everything else kept moving in small bites
The three-year vacancy at 413 N. Milwaukee looks even stranger next to how fast smaller footprints turned over during the same stretch. Mendocino Farms opened its first suburban-Chicago location in Vernon Hills this past April, a location that joins only two others in the entire state: Willis Tower and River North. That's a sandwich and salad chain that had two footholds in downtown Chicago and chose Vernon Hills, not another suburb, as the place to test whether it could work outside the Loop.
Farther down Townline Road, Honest Indian Vegetarian opened this past summer in a space that used to be a convenience store called Vernon Convenient, right next to Spice Bazaar, the neighborhood's Indian grocery. The franchise owners, Jay, Lisa, Devendra and Siddarth Patel, timed their grand opening ceremony to August 15, India's Independence Day, a detail that says more about who this restaurant is built to serve than any marketing copy could.
Just off the same corridor, Raising Cane's finished construction this spring on the site of the old Jameson's Charhouse, a project that took roughly two years to clear village approval over traffic flow concerns before a shovel ever went into the ground. And out at the Hawthorn Mall outlots, Perry's Steakhouse, which opened its standalone building on Milwaukee Avenue back in April 2024, has spent this year building out something it didn't originally have: a dedicated Friday lunch menu, quick enough for a midday visit without losing what regulars come back for.
None of those projects needed anywhere close to 100,000 square feet. A sandwich shop, a vegetarian restaurant, a chicken finger drive-through and a steakhouse can all fit into a single outlot pad. That's precisely why they moved faster than the grocery box ever could. The corner at Townline and Milwaukee has been filling in restaurant by restaurant for years. The empty department store a few blocks north was waiting for something built at an entirely different scale.
What this actually changes if you already live here
If you've been driving past that dark storefront for three years, the practical shift is real: Vernon Hills now has a full-format grocery option built around fresh, international and prepared foods rather than a straight national chain layout. That's a genuinely different kind of errand than a trip to the Whole Foods at Mellody Farm or the Jewel-Osco off Milwaukee Avenue, and it's the kind of specialty shopping that used to mean a drive into Chicago or up to Waukegan.
On the dining side, the same stretch of town now has more range than it did a year ago. If you want a fast lunch that isn't fried, Mendocino Farms gives you a downtown-caliber option without the drive downtown. If you're looking for something to plan around a Friday, Perry's lunch menu is worth checking before you default to the usual spot. And if Honest Indian Vegetarian's grand opening timing was any indication, that restaurant is meant to become a fixture, not a one-season novelty.
None of this required Vernon Hills to build anything new from the ground up. It required the right operators to find the right-sized spaces that were already sitting there, some for months and one for years. That's usually how a mature suburb like this one grows: not by adding acreage, but by finally matching what's empty with someone who knows exactly what to do with the square footage.
You can see the full rundown of what's currently under construction or recently opened across the village, including a few smaller projects not covered here, on the Village of Vernon Hills' own project tracker.
If you're watching this corner of Lake County change and wondering what it means for your own address, whether you're weighing a move, thinking about resale timing, or just curious what a property near this corridor is worth today, Payes Real Estate Group knows this stretch of Vernon Hills block by block. Reach out and work with us.
