Tähesaju City

Tähesaju City takes its name from a meteorite impact site discovered in the Tondiraba bog, the same crater that gave the area’s Tähesaju and Taevakivi streets their names; the Bauhaus store was built directly on the site of that crater. Developer Hindrek Leppsalu opened the first phase, 35,000 sqm, on December 12, 2008, at the Mustakivi and Laagna tee junction in Lasnamäe, with a second 35,000 sqm phase following on April 4, 2010, anchored by the Bauhaus opening.

A planned third phase of 30,000 sqm, which would have brought the complex to its originally announced 100,000 sqm total and made it Tallinn’s largest shopping center, was never built as envisioned; the property has instead grown through smaller, incremental additions, including the “Tähesaju Kaksikud” twin buildings project. Prisma anchors grocery, with Motonet, Home4You and Elke Auto as other major tenants; Prisma itself had operated on the site since November 2006, predating the formal Tähesaju City branding.

The format is a power center rather than an enclosed mall: standalone big-box buildings connected by shared parking rather than internal corridors, a layout suited to the furniture, DIY, automotive and electronics tenants that dominate the property rather than fashion retail. Positioned roughly seven minutes by car from central Tallinn, the property draws not just from Lasnamäe’s more than 112,000 residents but from Pirita, Maardu, Viimsi and surrounding Harju county communities, giving it a combined catchment its own marketing puts at close to 500,000 people.

That meteorite-crater origin story is more than trivia: it’s the differentiator that gives Tähesaju City an identity distinct from every other Tallinn retail property, none of which can claim their anchor store sits directly atop a documented impact site, and it’s a detail the center’s own marketing continues to reference well beyond the original phase-opening coverage.