What Finally Filled Deerfield's Empty Storefronts on Waukegan Road

For a long stretch of years, the retail box at 120 S. Waukegan Road sat there doing nothing. It used to be Art Van Furniture. Then Art Van wasn't a thing anymore, and the building just sat, a 40,850-square-foot question mark in the middle of Deerbrook Shopping Center that every Deerfield resident has driven past without a clear answer for what would ever go in there.

Then, over the past couple of years, three things happened on this stretch of Waukegan Road and Lake Cook Road that had nothing to do with each other on the surface but everything to do with each other underneath. A trampoline park moved into the old furniture store. A flooring retailer opened down the street. A breakfast spot took the corner at Lake Cook and Waukegan after residents spent months watching construction crews work on it. None of this reads as connected until you look at what the Village Board was doing at the same time, which is the part of the story that doesn't show up when you're just driving by.

The furniture store that became a trampoline park

The Village's own planning records show exactly how the Art Van space got its second life. In July 2024, the Deerfield Plan Commission held a public hearing on a special use request from Gateway Fairview Inc., the owner of Deerbrook Shopping Center, to bring in Sky Zone. Ryan Bickings, the project manager from Casco Architecture representing Sky Zone, walked the commission through a plan for slides, swings, trampolines and foam pits filling the old furniture floor, with a traffic study addressing how a Saturday birthday-party crowd would move through the Lake Cook and Waukegan intersection.

The level of detail in those records is almost funny in retrospect. Commissioners asked where the entrance would be and whether there was a back door. Bickings pointed to a canopy bump-out on the site plan and explained that food deliveries would come through the rear, everyone else through the front. The building's two exterior colors got names: Energetic Orange and Big Dipper gray. That's the kind of granular civic paperwork nobody reads until the building actually opens and you're standing in the parking lot wondering how a furniture warehouse turned into this.

Sky Zone's own announcement of its Illinois growth described the Deerfield location as the one that came first, ahead of four more Chicago-area parks that followed into 2026. For a business that operates more than 265 parks nationally, choosing this specific vacant box on this specific stretch of Waukegan Road wasn't an accident. It was a bet on foot traffic that was already building around it.

Floor & Decor and the rest of the block

Sky Zone wasn't the only new name on Waukegan Road. In his New Year's message looking back on 2024, Deerfield Mayor Dan Shapiro named Floor & Decor at 96 S. Waukegan Road among the newest businesses in town, already open by the time he wrote it. That's a few hundred feet from the Sky Zone building, on the same road, filling in what had been another quiet stretch of retail.

Read on its own, a flooring store opening next to a trampoline park doesn't tell you much. Read together with the Village's other 2024 business, it starts to look like a corridor the Village was actively working to fill rather than a coincidence of two unrelated leases closing around the same time.

The corner that took years to build

A few blocks south, at the corner of Lake Cook and Waukegan, a different kind of opening played out in slow motion. A local food writer described watching construction on that corner for what felt like forever, driving west on Lake Cook Road and wondering when the lights would finally come on. When they did, the space became a Brunch Cafe location at 250 Lake Cook Road, part of a small regional chain with an existing location in Kildeer and new locations also landing in Arlington Heights and Carpentersville. The writer, who lives in Northbrook, noted that the Deerfield opening cut what used to be an 18-minute drive to the Kildeer location down to four or five minutes from home.

Here's a quick reference for what's actually sitting on this corridor now, since the three openings landed close enough together that it's easy to lose track of which building is which:

Why this stretch, why now

None of this happened in a vacuum. In the same year Shapiro was welcoming Sky Zone and Floor & Decor to town, the Village Board also established a Lake Cook Road Tax Increment Financing District, a tool that lets a municipality capture the growth in property tax revenue from new development in a designated area and reinvest it back into that same area's infrastructure. It's a mechanism cities use specifically to make underused commercial corridors more attractive to the kind of tenant who might otherwise pass on a tired shopping center. The Village Board also considered or approved more than 600 new housing units across Deerfield in that same period, according to Shapiro's message. More rooftops within a short drive of Waukegan Road is exactly the kind of demand signal a retailer studies before committing to a 40,000-square-foot lease.

Put those two facts next to the Sky Zone and Floor & Decor openings and the corridor stops looking like scattered luck. It looks like a Village that spent 2024 building the conditions for this stretch of road to fill in, and then watched it start to happen.

What this actually changes on a Tuesday afternoon

For residents, the practical version of all this is simpler than the zoning language. If you have a kid with a birthday coming up and you used to drive to a neighboring suburb for a trampoline party, that trip is now a few minutes down Waukegan Road instead. If your Saturday morning routine has included a stop for coffee and something warm, there's a Brunch Cafe location on the Lake Cook corner that didn't exist before, with the same menu of signature egg sandwiches and full breakfast plates the chain built its name on at its original Kildeer location. If you've been meaning to redo a floor and kept putting off the drive to a bigger box store, Floor & Decor is now on the same road as the trampoline park and the new brunch spot, which makes for an unusually efficient Saturday if you're the kind of person who likes to knock out three errands in one loop.

The corridor is still filling in. Not every empty storefront on this stretch has a tenant yet, and the Village's TIF district exists precisely because there's more room to fill. But the pattern is clear enough now that the next vacant box on Waukegan Road probably won't sit empty as long as the old Art Van space did. Deerfield spent 2024 laying the groundwork for that, even if most residents only noticed it when the orange sign went up.

If you've been watching this corner of Deerfield change and you're curious what it means for property values nearby, or you're weighing a move within the North Shore and want a read on how a neighborhood's daily rhythm actually works before you commit to it, Abbie Homes Group spends its time exactly this way, block by block, long before any of it shows up in a listing description. Reach out and request a Home Valuation, and let's talk about what a corridor like this is really telling you.