National and Barrington Is Getting Its Grocery Store Back. It Isn't the One That Left.
Whole Foods closed its doors at 11666 National Boulevard on October 13, 2025, ending a run that had made the corner of National and Barrington a fixture for Mar Vista shoppers for decades. The closure didn't end the company's presence on the Westside. Whole Foods is rebuilding several miles east, redeveloping a former Albertsons at 3443 S. Sepulveda Boulevard in Palms, with an opening the company targeted for September 2026. The building it left behind on National is going to someone else entirely.
Lazy Acres Natural Market, the Santa Barbara grocer founded in 1991, has taken over the old Whole Foods shell and is aiming for a Fall 2026 opening timed to its own 35th anniversary. It will be the company's seventh Southern California store and its first on the Westside. Two grocery chains are effectively trading corners this season, and the one moving into Mar Vista already has a reputation worth understanding before the doors open.
Whole Foods didn't abandon the Westside when it shut the National Boulevard location. It relocated its footprint to a redeveloped former Albertsons on Sepulveda in Palms, a short drive from the old site, with a September 2026 target date. The transition wasn't painless for the people who worked at the National Boulevard store. Reporting at the time noted the closure left some employees in limbo, with a few offered transfers to stores farther from home and others left uncertain about what came next.
For shoppers, the practical effect is that the specific building at National and Barrington sat empty. The company that had anchored that corner for years didn't just downsize or pause. It packed up and moved its Westside presence to a different address, leaving a fully built grocery shell with nobody in it.
Lazy Acres has been building toward this for close to a year. The company's own October 2025 announcement said construction on the National Boulevard site would begin the following January, aiming for an opening later in 2026. That construction window lines up with a broader milestone. Lazy Acres turns 35 this year, and the company has framed the Mar Vista store as part of that anniversary rather than a routine expansion.
The chain currently operates in:
Mar Vista becomes the seventh store and the first west of the 405. Joe Ragusa, the company's Vice President of Merchandising, described the expansion in personal terms when the deal was announced.
"I am an LA native, so growing our business in Los Angeles and opening a new store on the Westside is something we are all really excited about."
Lazy Acres also markets itself around a specific set of values that go beyond produce aisles. The company is a member of 1% For The Planet and describes its approach as one built around organic and seasonal food, wellness products, and community education rather than pure volume retail.
The Los Feliz location, which opened in 2023 near the corner of Franklin and Western, gives Mar Vista shoppers a preview of what to expect rather than a guess. That store built a following fast enough to draw comparisons to the wealthier neighborhood's other grocers, including Lassen's, Albertsons, Ralphs, and Jons, and it became known locally for cooking workshops and support for neighborhood nonprofits rather than just a hot bar and a produce section.
The hot bar is part of the draw, though. Regulars at the Los Feliz store point to specific items, most often Mary's chicken coconut chicken tenders, as the reason they keep coming back. On price, the store has settled into a specific tier in shoppers' minds, described by one regular as "expensive, but not Erewhon-expensive." That positioning matters for Mar Vista. Shoppers who already know Lazy Acres from Los Feliz or one of its other locations aren't walking into an unknown brand when the National Boulevard doors open. They're walking into a store whose price point and personality have already been tested a few miles away.
The part of this story that gets flattened in most roundups is the timing. Whole Foods is targeting a September 2026 opening in Palms. Lazy Acres is targeting a Fall 2026 opening in Mar Vista. Both are new construction projects landing in the same season, within a short drive of each other, on the same general stretch of the Westside grocery map.
That density is unusual. It isn't two competitors opening next door to fight over the same customers. Whole Foods in Palms and Lazy Acres in Mar Vista serve different daily radii, and neither is positioned as a direct answer to the other. What it means for someone who has shopped at National and Barrington for years is that the neighborhood isn't getting its old grocery store back in any literal sense. It's getting a full replacement, built by a different company, with a different philosophy about what a grocery store is for, landing in the same season that its predecessor reopens somewhere else entirely.
Construction is underway on the timeline the company laid out last fall, which puts the corner somewhere in the middle of a buildout that started in January. Lazy Acres has said it will share updates on hiring and store progress through its website and its Instagram account, @lazyacresmarket, rather than through informal channels. For residents who have watched the plywood and permit signage for months, that's the most reliable way to get a real date rather than a guess.
The shell at National and Barrington has sat dark for close to a year. By the time Lazy Acres opens this fall, the wait will have outlasted the anniversary the store is named for.
Stacy Young tracks what's opening, closing, and changing across Mar Vista and the surrounding Westside as it happens rather than after the fact. If you want to know the moment a firm date lands for the National Boulevard store, reach out.
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