Boot Barn Moves Into Dead At Home Space as Everett Mall Reopens as an Open-Air Center

Boot Barn has signed for a 20,028-square-foot store at 1402 SE Everett Mall Way in Everett, Washington, taking over part of the box that At Home vacated after its 2025 bankruptcy. The lease, reported October 7 by CityBiz, lands inside The Hub @ Everett, the open-air makeover of what used to be an enclosed regional mall. Construction on the space is set to start in November, with a grand opening targeted for late 2028, according to CityBiz.

The deal is small on paper and useful as a signal. A dead big-box anchor just found a tenant, inside a redevelopment that's still being built out piece by piece, and that's the exact kind of leasing activity that tells a landlord the format change is working.

Brixton Capital bought the enclosed Everett Mall in 2017 for $36 million and has spent the years since converting roughly 491,000 square feet of dead interior corridors into storefronts that face the parking lot and a new street. The old food court and the rest of the mall's interior are closed for the renovation, according to KIRO7. Trader Joe's, Ulta, Five Below and Old Navy are staying open through the construction and remain the center's working anchors.

At Home, the home-decor chain, filed Chapter 11 in June 2025 carrying about $2 billion in debt and closed dozens of stores in waves that summer, Retail Dive reported at the time. Its Everett box is only now getting backfilled, and Boot Barn is taking part of it rather than the whole thing. Big-box space built for one category doesn't have to be re-let to one tenant.

Boot Barn wasn't the only signing. Shake Shack also leased 3,475 square feet near Old Navy, its first Everett location, in the same announcement. The center's marquee tenant question is still unresolved: Brixton had lined up Topgolf for a three-story, 68,000-square-foot building with an 11-acre driving range, dropped it earlier this year reportedly over concerns about Topgolf's finances after Callaway Golf sold a 60 percent stake to Leonard Green & Partners, then watched a developer float an apartment project for the same site, and by mid-September was reportedly back in talks to revive the original plan. Everett's own economic development director told KIRO7 the city "may have dodged a bullet" when the deal first fell apart.

Boot Barn ended its first fiscal quarter of 2027, on June 27, with 566 stores, and had grown to 571 by the time it reported earnings on July 29. It opened 27 new stores in that quarter alone and is guiding to 70 new stores for the full fiscal year, which would keep annual unit growth in the 12 to 15 percent range the company has been running. Over the trailing twelve months it added 93 stores, a 20 percent increase, and the company has talked publicly about a long-term opportunity to reach 1,200 stores across the U.S., per Zacks.

CEO John Hazen struck a confident tone on the July earnings call: "We are pleased with our strong start to fiscal 2027, as first quarter results exceeded our expectations and reflected broad-based strength across the business. Our team continues to execute at a high level, delivering solid same store sales growth, expanding margin, and opening new stores that continue to perform above our expectations."

A chain opening 70-plus stores a year toward a 1,200-store target is going to keep showing up in dead anchor boxes like this one, and redevelopment landlords with a vacant junior anchor should have Boot Barn on the call list before the space sits empty another leasing cycle. The Topgolf back-and-forth is worth following on its own too: an anchor that gets dropped and then quietly revived says something about how landlords are underwriting experiential tenants right now, not just about one project in Washington. The lease is signed now. The opening isn't targeted until late 2028. In a redevelopment this size, "coming soon" and "open for business" can sit years apart.