Walk down Dahlia toward Coast Highway this month and you'll find the entrance to Sherman Library & Gardens moved to the street corner, a chunk of the grounds fenced behind construction mesh, and no café service where Café Jardin used to seat brunch crowds on Sunday mornings. The garden that has anchored Corona del Mar Village for sixty years is mid-demolition on the most significant rebuild in its history, and it won't fully reopen until late summer 2027.
If you've lived here a while, that closure probably registered as a loss. It shouldn't. Watch what's happened in the Village since the fences went up and a different story emerges: Sherman Gardens was never actually the center of daily life here. It was one stop in a loop that also runs through a Saturday morning market and a stretch of restaurants on Coast Highway, and that loop hasn't missed a beat with the garden dark. The construction fence is an accidental experiment in what this neighborhood actually needs to function, and the answer says more about CdM than the garden ever did on its own.
What's Actually Behind the Fence
The numbers on this project are bigger than most people assume. The Grow the Gardens campaign broke ground on February 26, 2026, funding a $17 million revitalization that will run roughly 18 months. Kirstie Acevedo, president of the M.H. Sherman Company, has described the intent as designing the new campus to complement the character of the Village while sharpening the garden's mission around horticulture, education, and art. The plan includes a new Bell Tower entrance, a full rework of the garden rooms, and a relocation of the restaurant space to a Pacific Coast Highway frontage, freeing the central lawn for programming instead of table service.
That restaurant piece matters if you used to treat Café Jardin as a lunch spot. Regular on-site dining stopped when construction began, and the new farm-to-table concept isn't slated to open until fall 2027. In the meantime, the garden has been running periodic Hazeltine's Afternoon Tea experiences instead of daily food service, and the entrance fee now follows seasonal pricing tied to the debut of this summer's headline exhibition, Dog Days of Sherman, which opened in mid-May. The garden itself is still 2.2 acres of working collections, still worth the visit for the succulent beds and the koi pond, but it's a smaller and more curated version of itself until the Bell Tower is finished.
Newport Beach's city council has formally recognized Sherman as the cultural hub of Corona del Mar, which makes the timing of this closure feel significant. A neighborhood doesn't usually get to watch its named cultural anchor go dark for a year and a half and see what fills the gap. This one did.
Where the Village Actually Spends Its Saturday
The answer, it turns out, was already running two blocks away the entire time. The Corona del Mar Certified Farmers Market sets up every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the corner of Marguerite Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway, rain or shine, and it hasn't needed the garden's foot traffic to stay full. Vendors are certified either by the California Department of Agriculture or Orange County's Department of Environmental Health, which is the kind of detail that matters if you're the type of resident who cares where a Saturday tomato actually came from. The market has run on this exact rhythm all year, and it's the piece of the Village's weekly pattern that construction fencing never touched.
What that tells you: the informal social infrastructure here doesn't route through a single landmark. It routes through repetition. The market happens every week regardless of what else is open or closed on PCH, and that reliability is worth more to daily life in the Village than any single building, however historic.
The Restaurant Row Absorbed the Rest
The other half of the loop is Coast Highway's restaurant stretch, and it's had a busier year than usual precisely because there's less competing for a resident's evening. Five Crowns has been running its SideDoor happy hour Monday through Thursday from 4:30 to 6 p.m., along with a summer run of $2 oyster nights with live music that closes out on August 31. If that's on your list, this is the final week to catch it before the promotion ends for the season.
Down the block, Foretti's CDM has quietly changed hands. The restaurant, which opened in 2013 and built a following on Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana-certified wood-fired pizza baked at 900 degrees, is now under longtime restaurateur and Level 1 Sommelier Thaddeus Foret, who kept the original recipes and much of the kitchen team intact. It's the kind of ownership transition that happens quietly in a neighborhood restaurant and never makes it past word of mouth, which is exactly why it's worth naming here.
CDM Restaurant has leaned into its speakeasy concept, Under CDM, which requires no password and no reservation, a deliberate contrast to the main dining room upstairs where phone reservations are the only option. The restaurant is backed by producer McG and restaurateur Jordan Otterbein, the same pairing behind A Restaurant in Newport Beach, and its executive chef, Elvis Morales, has built the menu around what the restaurant calls creative American cuisine. A few doors down, Bandera keeps doing what it's done for years under Hillstone Restaurant Group: rotisserie chicken over hardwood fire, cooked in view of the dining room.
None of these openings or ownership changes happened because Sherman Gardens closed. But they're the reason the closure hasn't left a hole. The Village's social calendar was always distributed across the market, the restaurant row, and the garden. Remove one leg and the other two hold the weight, at least for eighteen months.
What to Actually Do This Season
If you're planning your fall around what's open right now, here's the practical version of everything above:
- The Corona del Mar Certified Farmers Market runs every Saturday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., at Marguerite and PCH, with no seasonal closures.
- Sherman Gardens is open under seasonal admission pricing with the Dog Days of Sherman exhibition on view, though the entrance has moved to the Dahlia corner and dining is limited to scheduled Hazeltine's Afternoon Tea sessions rather than daily café service.
- SideDoor's $2 oyster and live music nights run through August 31, so this week is the last call before the promotion ends.
- The Corona del Mar Chamber has its Moonlight Masquerade Halloween Boutique Opening scheduled for August 28, an early marker that the Village's fall event calendar is already starting to fill in behind the summer lineup.
None of this requires the garden to be finished. That's the point. The Village's actual rhythm, the one that determines whether a Saturday here feels like a Saturday here, was never dependent on a single 2.2-acre property. It's dependent on a market that shows up every week and a strip of Coast Highway that keeps changing hands without ever going quiet.
When Sherman's Bell Tower entrance opens in 2027, it'll be a genuine event, worth marking on a calendar. Until then, the neighborhood isn't waiting around. It's already proven it doesn't have to.
If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in a neighborhood like this, beyond the construction updates and restaurant openings, that's the kind of on-the-ground read Steve High & Evan Corkett build every conversation around. Work With Us — Start a Confidential Consultation.
