The 21,000-square-foot former Barnes & Noble building at 1599 Southeast Road is being converted into five tenant spaces following the bookstore's relocation into Westfarms mall. Four tenants are named and moving in on a staggered timeline through late 2026 and early 2027: Hannoush Jewelers — expanding from roughly 1,500 square feet at Westfarms, where it has operated since 1986, into about 6,000 square feet — plus Goldfish Swim School with a 30-by-60-foot pool in the building's rear, children's fitness franchise KidStrong, and a second Connecticut Cold Stone Creamery for owner Venkata Kadiyla. Farmington's Plan and Zoning Commission approved 1599 SE Road LLC's site plan in July.
The tenant lineup here is a retail-strategy lesson in itself. None of these four are tenants that would have paid mall rates for visibility; none of them are tenants that would have paid mall rates for a space this size. Jeweler, swim school, children's gym, ice cream: all four are destination businesses whose customers drive to them with intent — and all four are family-oriented, which reads as one ownership group deliberately building a "kid services" cluster around the Westfarms-adjacent corridor, with one more space still available. For landlords with vacant big-box inventory in the Valley, the playbook is worth studying: this ownership group didn't wait for a single replacement anchor. It found four mid-sized tenants with committed owner-operators behind them and rebuilt the property around what they actually needed.