Walk into Town & Country Village this month and the first thing you notice is a six-foot photo of Tom Brady staring back at you from a storefront that used to be quiet. CardVault by Tom Brady opened at the corner shopping center on August 15, right next to the SWEET55 chocolate counter, with the first 25 visitors walking away with a limited-edition Palo Alto hat and everyone else getting a shot at a mini helmet signed by Christian McCaffrey. It is the kind of opening that gets photographed, tagged, and forgotten by October.
That is not the interesting part of what is happening at Town & Country Village right now. The interesting part is happening on the other side of the building, on a stretch of asphalt most shoppers only cross to get to Trader Joe's, where the same company that just leased space to a football legend's card shop is also asking the city for permission to build two seven-story apartment towers. One end of the property is getting a louder retail mix. The other end might get considerably taller. Both moves belong to the same landlord, and neither happened by accident.
What Just Moved In Next to the Chocolate Shop
CardVault's Palo Alto location is its 17th nationwide and its first in the immediate Peninsula, tucked into the shopping center at El Camino Real and Embarcadero. The store sells single cards, sealed boxes, and graded memorabilia, and it works as an authorized submission point for PSA, Beckett, and SGC for collectors who want their own cards graded. Its neighbor, SWEET55, has been part of the center since 2022, when founder Ursula Schnyder brought her Half Moon Bay chocolate operation back to the town where she first started developing recipes in her own backyard.
The timing lines up with something else that happened a few weeks earlier. From August 9 through 13, Town & Country ran its annual Back to Class Dash, sending kids on a scavenger hunt that started at PREP in suite 125 and looped them past a dozen other shops to fill a pencil case with school supplies. It is a small, recurring event, the kind that never makes news outside a neighborhood Facebook group, but it says something the CardVault opening does not: this center still runs on the rhythm of families who live within walking distance, not just weekend traffic drawn in by a famous name on a storefront.
The Tenant Swap Nobody Photographed
Not every change at Town & Country announces itself with a grand opening. A commercial listing for one of the center's storefronts describes a space "previously Marine Layer," now home to a business called The Stanford Shop. No press release, no ribbon cutting, just a quiet handoff between one casualwear brand and a new tenant that fits the center's long habit of leaning into its location across the street from Stanford and Palo Alto High.
That kind of swap is normal for a shopping center built around specialty stores rather than one or two anchor tenants. Books Inc, Kara's Cupcakes, Tin Pot Creamery, Bar Method, Howard's Shoes for Children, and Oren's Hummus Express have all coexisted here for years precisely because none of them depends on being the reason people show up. Trader Joe's and Peet's do that job, and everyone else benefits from the foot traffic.
The Part of the Property You Walk Past to Reach the Groceries
Behind the row of shops facing El Camino Real sits a parking lot that runs along Encina Avenue, and that lot is where the center's other story is unfolding. Ellis Partners, which has owned Town & Country Village since 2004, filed a pre-application with the city last November for two seven-story apartment buildings totaling 158 units, split between sites at 44 and 88 Encina Avenue. Each building would include a wellness center and a rooftop sky lounge, and the renderings borrow the clay tile roofs and covered walkways already familiar to anyone who has shopped here.
There is a wrinkle worth sitting with. A few months before filing that application, Ellis Partners had fought against a different project on the lot right next door: a 10-unit condominium development at 70 Encina Avenue proposed by Stormland LLC, which the city approved despite the landlord's opposition. Ellis Partners then came back with a plan to build two buildings of its own flanking that same approved condo site, at a scale several times larger.
Hannah Perkins, a vice president at Ellis Partners, framed the company's own proposal as continuity rather than contrast:
"We care deeply about the character of Town & Country. That's why we've invested in architecture and landscaping that respects the setting."
Ellis Partners has said every phase of construction would aim to minimize disruption to the existing shops, which is the kind of assurance a landlord gives when the retail tenants sitting fifty feet from a construction zone are the same tenants paying rent through the whole thing. You can read the full reporting on the apartment proposal from Palo Alto Online if you want the renderings and the full council discussion.
A Shopping Center Built From Someone Else's Old Bridge
None of this would be much of a surprise to anyone who knows how this property came together in the first place. The 14 acres beneath Town & Country Village were once part of a Mexican land grant, Rancho del Arroyo de San Francisquito, and by the early twentieth century the parcel was known locally as the Greer property, home to a family house built before 1890 that shared the land with a gas station, a drive-in restaurant, and the occasional visiting Barnum and Bailey circus.
Developer Ronald Williams cleared the site in 1952 and opened the shopping center in 1953 for a construction cost of five million dollars, with more than sixty stores arranged ranch-style around 70 to 100 mature oak trees that Williams chose to preserve rather than remove. Some of the original buildings were framed, in part, from salvaged fir and redwood logging trestles that had been built in the early 1840s further north in California and hauled south to become part of a shopping center instead of a railway. The Village Cheese House, a sandwich counter that opened at the center in 1959, stayed in business for sixty years before finally closing in 2019.
A center that started life as reclaimed lumber wrapped around someone else's backyard oaks has never really had a fixed identity. It has always been reinventing itself in pieces, tenant by tenant, while keeping the trees and the walkways that make it feel unchanged.
What's Actually Worth Watching From Here
If you shop at Town & Country regularly, the practical takeaways are simple:
- CardVault is open seven days a week and plans ongoing trade nights and special guest appearances, so the crowd from opening weekend is likely to become a regular fixture rather than a one-time draw.
- The Encina Avenue apartment proposal is still in the pre-application stage as of last check, which means further design review, public hearings, and likely revisions are still ahead before anything resembling construction begins.
- Tenant changes like the Marine Layer to Stanford Shop handoff tend to happen quietly, so the version of the center you remember from a year ago is probably already a few stores out of date.
The louder story and the quieter one are connected in a way that is easy to miss if you only notice the storefronts you walk past. A shopping center that has survived seventy years by reinventing its retail mix one lease at a time is now trying the same trick with housing on the parking lot behind it. Whether that plan clears the city's review process the way the last one did remains to be seen, but it is worth watching if Town & Country is part of your weekly routine.
For more of this kind of ground-level look at the blocks that make up Palo Alto, from the shops that open to the ones quietly changing hands, Christy Lin keeps an eye on the details that make this neighborhood what it is. Let's connect if you ever want to talk about any of it.
