Shops at Don Mills

Cadillac Fairview built the original Don Mills Centre on this site in 1955 as a 400,000 sqft shopping center serving Canada’s first master-planned residential community, enclosing and expanding it to 462,000 sqft in 1978. Declining anchor department stores through the 1990s and 2000s, including the exit of T. Eaton Co., led Cadillac Fairview to demolish the enclosed mall entirely in 2006 and rebuild it as CF Shops at Don Mills, which opened April 22, 2009 as one of Canada’s first large-scale open-air lifestyle centers, a genuine departure from the enclosed regional-mall format that had dominated Canadian retail development for decades.

McEwan Fine Foods, Anthropologie and Eataly anchor the specialty tenant mix across roughly 580,000 sqft and 111 tenants, with Eataly opening its third Toronto location here in May 2024. The center runs storefronts along private internal streets centered on a town square with a 10-metre Douglas Coupland-designed clock tower, a layout built to read as a neighborhood high street rather than a conventional mall. A 2017 renovation, costing $21 million, upgraded pedestrian areas, landscaping and public art.

Cadillac Fairview has also developed residential towers around the retail core in partnership with FRAM Building Group and Lanterra Developments, including Rodeo Drive, Flaire and LIV Lofts, embedding the shopping center inside a genuine mixed-use neighborhood rather than treating it as standalone retail. The property lacks direct rapid transit access, unlike Cadillac Fairview’s nearby CF Fairview Mall and Bayview Village, and serves a trade area with an average household income cited at roughly $171,000.

As of June 2026, Cadillac Fairview has listed the property for sale as part of a broader strategy to concentrate its portfolio around its highest-performing, transit-connected assets, following recent sales of CF Champlain, CF Fairview Park, CF Lime Ridge and CF Promenades St-Bruno. Marketing materials describe it as generating approximately $665 in tenant sales per square foot.