Drive past the Novi Road entrance to Twelve Oaks this month and you will see the same thing you saw in the spring: a long stretch of construction barricades where the old Sears used to be, a few new signs bolted to the exterior, and no clear answer to the question every regular shopper here has been asking since last year. Is anything actually open yet?
The honest answer is more useful than a simple yes or no, and it says something about how big retail conversions actually move once the press releases stop.
Three Stores, Not One
When Sears closed its Twelve Oaks location in 2019, the mall sat on more than 200,000 square feet of dead anchor space for six years. Most malls in that position backfill with a single replacement, another department store or a big-box tenant that mirrors what left. Simon Property Group, which took full ownership of Twelve Oaks from Taubman in November 2025, went a different direction. Instead of one tenant, the old Sears box is being split three ways between DICK's House of Sport, the Irish fast-fashion retailer Primark, and Round1 Bowling & Arcade.
The logic isn't hard to follow once you think about what the mall already has. Nordstrom, Macy's, and JCPenney still cover the traditional department store role at Twelve Oaks. What the mall didn't have was a reason for someone to spend two hours there on a Tuesday night. DICK's House of Sport is built to be that reason on its own: this format includes a climbing wall, a running track, batting cages, and a golf simulator, plus a turf field that converts to an ice rink in winter. Round1 adds bowling, arcade games, and karaoke rooms. Primark rounds it out with the kind of value fashion and home goods that give people an actual shopping reason to be there before or after the activities next door.
That's a different bet than a single department store replacement, and it's the kind of tenant mix that only makes sense in a mall that already has its anchors covered.
The Timeline Slipped, and That's Worth Knowing
Here's where it gets specific to right now. When the leasing was announced in May 2025, Twelve Oaks general manager Scott Lofton gave reporters a sequence: Primark and Round1 targeted for the first half of 2026, with DICK's House of Sport following in the fourth quarter.
That's a meaningful detail if you're the person who's been watching the fencing since last winter and wondering why nothing seems to have opened by late summer. The first half of 2026 has already passed. As of a directory refresh in July 2026, the mall's own store listing was still showing the redeveloped Sears space with a placeholder, more information on new stores coming soon, rather than confirmed store listings or opening dates for any of the three tenants.
That gap between an announced first-half target and a store directory still showing no confirmed openings in the seventh month of the year isn't unusual for a project this size. Converting a 200,000-square-foot department store into three separate build-outs, each with its own permitting, utility work, and tenant improvement schedule, tends to run past initial press timelines. But it does mean that if you assumed Primark or Round1 would be open and shopping by summer based on what you read last year, the ground truth by midsummer hadn't caught up to that projection. The safer read heading into fall is that DICK's House of Sport, targeted for the fourth quarter to begin with, is the one piece of this that's still tracking closest to its original window, since winter is also when that ice rink feature would actually make sense to debut.
If you've been driving past assuming you somehow missed an opening, you didn't. The timeline moved. Watch for that DICK's House of Sport debut as the more reliable marker of when the rest of the space follows.
What's Already Different at the Mall This Year
While the Sears wing works through its build-out, the rest of Twelve Oaks has kept adding things worth a stop.
- A Tesla showroom now operates inside the mall, serving EV shoppers from across western Oakland and Livingston counties without a dedicated dealership visit.
- POP MART and Build-A-Bear Workshop have given the mall a collectibles and family corner that skews younger than its luxury-adjacent stores.
- Tapper's, the Metro Detroit jeweler known for its Somerset Collection and Orchard Mall locations, runs its Gold Exchange concept here, a distinct format from a full jewelry store but carrying the same family name Oakland County shoppers already recognize.
- Crate & Barrel moved its only full-line Michigan store to Twelve Oaks in 2021 after 27 years at Somerset Collection in Troy, joining Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma in a home and entertaining wing that didn't exist in the mall's earlier era.
None of that is tied to the Sears redevelopment. It's a separate, ongoing shift in what this mall has become over the past several years, and it's part of why mall staff talk about the property differently than they did a decade ago.
Kelsey Ames, who handles marketing and sponsorships for the mall, put it plainly when the new leases were announced: the push isn't about backfilling retail for its own sake, it's about giving people a reason to get out and touch a product in person rather than order it online. Marquise Cook, who owns Alpha Parfum and runs a vendor booth inside the mall, has already noticed new stores opening around his own space, including Pottery Barn's move into a larger footprint. He's framed the mall's evolution as less about any single tenant and more about the kind of foot traffic that turns a shopping trip into the place you run into someone you haven't seen in years.
That's a fair way to think about what's coming next. The Sears wing isn't one ribbon-cutting moment. It's three separate businesses landing on three separate schedules inside a mall that's already been adding tenants around them for years.
What to Actually Watch For This Fall
If you're local and keeping an eye on this, here's the practical version. Don't expect a single grand reopening event for the old Sears space. Expect Primark and Round1 to land first, since their original target already passed and pressure to close that gap is building. Expect DICK's House of Sport, including the winter ice rink feature, to make the most sense as a late-year opening given its original fourth-quarter target and the seasonal tie-in. And expect the rest of the mall, the Tesla showroom, the POP MART corner, Tapper's Gold Exchange, Crate & Barrel's home wing, to keep functioning exactly as it has, independent of whatever's happening behind those Sears wing barricades.
Twelve Oaks has been part of daily life in Novi for almost fifty years, through department store closures, ownership changes, and now this three-way experiment in what replaces one. Whether that bet pays off in the way Simon and mall management are hoping is still an open question. But for now, the honest answer to what's actually open is: not the big one yet, and that's worth knowing before you plan a special trip around it.
If you're new to the area or thinking through what daily life looks like in a specific Novi neighborhood, from the mall corridor to the quieter subdivisions around it, Dan Fortin has spent his career learning southeast Michigan block by block. Let's Connect if you want a straight answer about any corner of it.
