On a Saturday morning at Bon Air, you can watch four fitness classes let out within twenty minutes of each other. Orangetheory empties into the courtyard around the same time a Pilates class wraps a few doors down, while a stretch studio and a yoga studio cycle their own students through the same stretch of walkway. Add a dance studio to that count and you have five movement-based businesses operating inside one 1950s-era shopping center in Greenbrae, alongside a grocery store, a pastry shop that has been baking since 1914, and a gaming lounge built for competitive play.
That is not what Bon Air was built to be. It is, however, exactly what Bon Air has always done: figure out what the neighborhood is missing and become that thing.
A Grocery Store for a Town That Didn't Have One
Bon Air exists because Greenbrae didn't have anywhere to buy food. In the late 1940s, a developer named Niels Schultz assembled roughly 600 acres of land in central Marin and named the property Greenbrae, borrowing the Scottish word "brae" for hillside, according to Marin Magazine's history of the center. Schultz donated land for a school, a fire department, a park and a yacht basin. What the new community still lacked was a place to shop, so Schultz built one. The market that became Bon Air Super Market opened in 1952. Three years later the center added a hardware store, a beauty salon, a barber shop, a dry cleaner and a drapery shop, filling out the errand list a young suburb actually needed.
That is the pattern worth noticing before anything else: Bon Air's first identity was a direct answer to a gap in daily life, not a retail concept imported from somewhere else.
From Petrini's to a Pharmacy With a Baseball Legend
About a decade after it opened, the original market gave way to a Petrini's supermarket, described in the center's own published history as one of that chain's most successful locations. The storefront the first grocery had occupied turned into a pharmacy, and that pharmacy carries one of the center's better-known bits of local lore: a sighting of Joe DiMaggio, the kind of detail that gets passed down at the dry cleaner's counter more often than it gets written down anywhere official.
None of this shows up on a listing sheet or a walk score. It shows up if you've lived in Greenbrae long enough to hear it from someone who was there, or if you go looking for the center's own history the way Marin Magazine's retrospective on Bon Air does.
When Bon Air Decided It Was a Gathering Place, Not Just a Stop
The center's most visible reinvention came in 2016, when Bon Air went through a construction project adding wider pedestrian paths, new landscaping, outdoor seating, fire pits and a bocce ball court. The framing at the time, from Andrea Schultz, president of Greenbrae Management, was explicit about what the center thought it was becoming:
"The role of shopping centers is evolving from functionality to more of a sense of community."
That quote, reported by the North Bay Business Journal when the 2016 renovation broke ground, is the hinge point between what Bon Air was in 1952 and what it is becoming now. The center stopped competing purely on convenience and started competing on whether people wanted to linger. Wi-Fi and electric vehicle charging stations were part of that same plan, years before EV charging became a common shopping center amenity across Marin.
What's Actually Parked at Bon Air Right Now
Walk the current directory and the "gathering place" framing looks less like marketing language and more like a description of what actually leases space there today. Alongside the grocery anchor, you'll find:
- Victoria Pastry, baking cakes and pastries since 1914
- A tailoring shop and a Fabricare dry cleaner with roots back to 1912
- A custom computer shop and a full-service framing and art gallery
- A jewelry store specializing in custom designs, plus a shoe store and a boutique
- A tennis and pickleball specialty shop
- Orangetheory Fitness, a Pilates studio, a dance studio, a stretch studio and a yoga studio
- A gaming destination built for competitive play
- A Bank of America branch and Tesla Supercharger stalls in the parking lot
Five fitness-adjacent businesses inside one strip center is not a coincidence of leasing timing. It is what happens when a shopping center located minutes from MarinHealth Medical Center leans into the fact that a meaningful share of its foot traffic is already there for wellness reasons, whether that's a doctor's appointment before lunch or a workout before the school pickup. Bon Air didn't have to guess what its customers wanted this decade. It just watched what they were already doing nearby and built around it, the same way Niels Schultz built a grocery store around a town with nowhere to shop.
The Dumpling Bar and the Pattern It Confirms
The center's own store map lists a new concept described as a neighborhood spot combining handcrafted dumplings with a full bar, targeted for an early summer 2026 opening. If that timeline held, it would have opened sometime around June, which means residents checking the directory this month should expect to find it open or very close to it.
What matters more than the exact opening date is what the concept represents next to everything else on that list. Bon Air isn't adding another quick-service lunch spot to compete with what's already there. It's adding a place designed to be lingered in after a workout or before a movie, which fits the same "gathering place" logic Andrea Schultz described in 2016 and the same needs-first instinct that built the center under Niels Schultz in 1952. The businesses change. The method doesn't.
Reading the Center Like a Local
If you live in Greenbrae and want to actually use this information instead of just knowing it, a few things are worth keeping in mind:
- The parking lot's Tesla Superchargers mean you can charge while you run every other errand on this list, not as an afterthought but as part of how the lot was designed.
- The fitness cluster runs on overlapping but distinct schedules. If Orangetheory's morning class is full, the yoga or stretch studio a few doors down often isn't.
- Victoria Pastry and the Fabricare dry cleaner are the two businesses on the current roster with the longest continuous history at the center, predating Bon Air itself in Victoria Pastry's case.
- The dumpling and cocktail spot is worth checking on now if it hasn't opened yet. Early-summer timelines for small food and beverage buildouts often slip by a few weeks.
None of this requires nostalgia to appreciate. Bon Air has changed its answer to "what does this neighborhood need" at least three times since 1952, from groceries, to hardware and personal services, to a gathering place with fire pits and bocce, to a wellness-and-hangout cluster with a dumpling bar on the way. The through-line isn't any single tenant. It's a shopping center that has stayed useful for seventy-plus years by paying closer attention to its own neighborhood than most centers bother to.
That kind of attention to the small, specific details of a place, the kind that separates a neighborhood you understand from one you're just passing through, is the same thing I try to bring to the Marin communities I work in every day. If you're curious about what's changing in Greenbrae or any of the towns nearby, or you'd just like to talk through what you're seeing on your own street, Rick van der Wal is always glad to compare notes. Let's Connect.
