Why does Bella Terra feel different than it did five years ago, even though half the buildings are exactly where you remember them?
The parking lot off Edinger Avenue still fills up the same way on a Saturday. Costco still runs a line to the gas pumps. Whole Foods, Kohl's, REI and Barnes & Noble still anchor the corners the way they have for years. But walk the inline shops between them and the mix has quietly shifted. Fewer racks of clothes. More places where you sit down, order something, and stay a while. That shift isn't random, and it isn't just Huntington Beach following some vague national trend toward "experiences." It's a pattern you can trace tenant by tenant, going back almost twenty years, and it tells you something specific about how this particular property has chosen to survive.
The stores that left didn't come back as stores
Start with what's actually happened to the square footage that's changed hands at Bella Terra since 2008.
Mervyn's closed that year in a liquidation, and Circuit City closed in the same wave of retail bankruptcies. The vacant Mervyn's building, along with the already-empty Montgomery Ward building, was demolished in 2010. Circuit City's old space wasn't torn down. Whole Foods Market moved in there instead, that same year. Costco opened on the cleared land in May 2012. Then, in the most telling move of the bunch, the exact footprint where Montgomery Ward once stood didn't get replaced with another retailer at all. In 2013, it became The Residences at Bella Terra, a 467-unit apartment complex with ground-floor retail.
That's the first clue. When a big-box anchor left, the property didn't always look for another big box. Sometimes it looked for people to live there instead.
The pattern kept going. Staples closed in early 2023 and Ulta Beauty took the space, a swap from office supplies to a beauty retailer people visit more often and for longer. Then, in early 2025, Burlington Coat Factory closed for good. It wasn't backfilled with another discount retailer. The space is being redeveloped into more apartments.
Look at that sequence and a theme emerges. Every time a traditional retail anchor has left Bella Terra over the past decade and a half, it has been replaced by either housing or by a business that sells something you can't just order to your door.
Two 2026 openings confirm it
The newest additions make the case even more directly.
Bacio di Latte, an Italian gelato brand known for making its gelato fresh daily with organic milk and imported ingredients, was on track to open its first Huntington Beach location at Bella Terra this summer, next to Philz Coffee, with earlier reporting pointing to a late-July debut. Later this year, in October, The NOW Massage is opening a 2,195-square-foot studio near Madison Reed, offering Swedish-inspired and deep tissue massage.
Neither of these is a store in the traditional sense. You can't browse Bacio di Latte's gelato case online and have it shipped. You can't get a massage delivered by courier. Both businesses require you to physically show up, and both are built around spending time on-site rather than grabbing a bag and leaving. That's not a coincidence. It's the same logic that turned the old Montgomery Ward into apartments and the old Burlington into more apartments. Bella Terra has stopped betting on square footage you browse and started betting on square footage you occupy.
Here's the tenant history laid out chronologically, because seeing the trades side by side makes the pattern harder to miss than reading about any single opening in isolation.
| Year | What left | What replaced it |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 | Mervyn's (liquidation) and Circuit City (bankruptcy) close | Buildings sit vacant |
| 2010 | Mervyn's and Montgomery Ward buildings demolished | Whole Foods Market opens in the old Circuit City space |
| 2012 | Cleared land from the 2010 demolition | Costco Wholesale opens |
| 2013 | Former Montgomery Ward anchor footprint | The Residences at Bella Terra, 467 apartment units |
| 2023 | Staples | Ulta Beauty |
| 2025 | Burlington Coat Factory | New apartment development |
| 2026 | Retail space near Philz Coffee | Bacio di Latte gelato, expected this summer |
| 2026 | Space near Madison Reed | The NOW Massage, opening October |
Two decades, and not one of those transitions replaced a closed retailer with another closed-store-risk retailer. Every single one moved toward housing, food, or a personal service.
Why the anchors still do the heavy lifting
None of this works without the anchor tenants that never left, and the reason they've held is worth understanding if you're trying to figure out why Bella Terra keeps pulling traffic while other Orange County retail centers struggle.
Most aging shopping centers were built around department stores, which depend on comparison shopping trips that people make a handful of times a year. Bella Terra's current anchor lineup, Costco, Whole Foods, Kohl's, REI, and Barnes & Noble, works differently. Grocery and warehouse-club anchors generate weekly household trips, not occasional ones. Every person who drives in for a Costco run or a Whole Foods pickup walks past, or drives past, the inline restaurants and shops on their way in and out. That recurring weekly traffic is a structural advantage a single department-store anchor never gave a property like this, and it's part of why smaller tenants here can survive on foot traffic that a comparable inline shop in a fashion-anchored mall would never see.
It also explains why the property has been comfortable trading retail square footage for apartments. When your anchor tenants already guarantee weekly visits, you don't need every remaining storefront to be a destination on its own. You can afford to let some of that space become homes for the people who'll walk to Whole Foods anyway.
The Tuscan rebuild nobody remembers building
If you've ever wondered why Bella Terra looks the way it does, with the stucco arches and the open-air layout instead of a mall corridor, the answer goes back to what stood there before.
The site was originally home to Huntington Center, which opened in 1966 as the first enclosed, all-weather mall in Orange County. It cost 20 million dollars to build, housed 55 retailers across more than 840,000 square feet, and had parking for 3,700 cars. Its original anchors were The Broadway, JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, and Barker Brothers, and the mall even displayed an eight-ton statue shipped over from Budapest at its center court, a detail that's mostly forgotten now but was a genuine landmark when the mall opened.
That enclosed mall declined through the 1990s as anchors closed one by one. DJM Capital Partners bought the property in 2002 and spent the next few years converting it into the open-air, Tuscan-inspired center that opened as Bella Terra in 2006. The name means "beautiful land" in Italian, and the redevelopment is why walking through the property today feels more like an outdoor plaza than a mall, even though the bones of the old Huntington Center are still there under the stucco.
What's worth putting on your calendar
Beyond the tenant changes, Bella Terra runs a steady rotation of community programming that's easy to miss if you only think of it as a shopping stop. Throughout the year the property hosts a farmers market, live music, a kids club with weekly activities, an art walk, a wine walk, a beer fest, and a car show, on top of seasonal holiday events. Exact dates shift year to year, so if one of these is the reason you're heading over, it's worth checking the center's own event calendar before you go.
A few practical notes if it's been a while since your last visit:
- The gelato shop was expected to debut in late July, so it may already be open or close to it by the time you read this. The massage studio isn't due until October.
- The apartment buildings on-site, including the newest one replacing Burlington, mean more of your neighbors may already live at Bella Terra rather than just shop there.
- If you're headed in for a Costco or Whole Foods run, that's also your best window to catch the inline restaurants without the wait, since those anchors draw the heaviest weekday and weekend traffic.
Bella Terra isn't becoming a different kind of place by accident. Every trade it's made over the last two decades points the same direction, away from square footage you browse and toward square footage you occupy, whether that's an apartment, a plate of food, or a table at a gelato counter. Understanding that pattern doesn't just explain why the center feels different than it did five years ago. It's a decent preview of what the next vacancy there is likely to become.
If you're curious how this kind of shift in a specific corridor connects to what's happening with home values and demand across Huntington Beach, our neighborhood page tracks both. And if downtown's own retail reshuffle caught your eye, we covered what's opening and closing on Main Street in a separate look at that corridor.
Whenever you're ready to talk about buying, selling, or just understanding what a specific Huntington Beach street is worth right now, AceEstate is local, bilingual, and always happy to talk shop, even if the only thing on your mind today is gelato.
