Westfarms opened on October 14, 1974, on the town line between Farmington and West Hartford, Connecticut, developed by Taubman Centers with the same shotgun-style layout, sightline from end to end, that its sister property The Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey shares. Original anchors JCPenney, G. Fox & Co. and Sage-Allen gave the mall its early identity; G. Fox became part of Filene’s in 1993 and Sage-Allen’s space followed as a Filene’s Men’s and Home store in 1995, with both eventually rebranding to Macy’s, which now holds two anchor positions on the property. Lord & Taylor, which relocated here from Bishop’s Corner in West Hartford in 1980, closed permanently on August 2, 2020, as part of that chain’s 19-store national closure round. Nordstrom, which opened in September 1997 as New England’s first and Connecticut’s only location, briefly appeared on a 2020 national closure list before the company explicitly confirmed the Westfarms store was not among those closing, and remains open today. Simon Property Group owns and manages Westfarms, having acquired Taubman Centers in stages beginning in 2020 and completing full ownership in November 2025.
The 2002 renovation removed the mall’s original 1974 center-court waterfall fountains and small stage, replacing them with an open layout anchored by a Starbucks. A 2008 renovation refreshed the main entrance and added P.F. Chang’s and Brio Tuscan Grille as sit-down dining with outdoor summer seating, alongside a wave of upscale additions, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co. and Vera Bradley among them, that replaced departing mid-market tenants. Jordan’s Furniture anchors the home goods wing. Big Y Foods, a Massachusetts-based supermarket chain, announced in October 2025 that it will build a roughly 53,000 sqft store on an outparcel on the southern side of the Westfarms property, not inside the enclosed mall itself, targeting a spring 2027 opening; a full grocery presence at this scale would be unusual for a property of this format once it opens.
Coach, Michael Kors, Kate Spade New York and Tiffany & Co. anchor the accessible luxury tier, with Arhaus, Pottery Barn and Jordan’s Furniture forming a home goods cluster alongside Macy’s Furniture Gallery. Anthropologie, Athleta, Free People, J.Crew, Tommy Bahama, Tory Burch, Urban Outfitters and Vineyard Vines carry the contemporary fashion floor, and lululemon and The North Face cover the activewear category. POP MART and Build-A-Bear Workshop give the property a collectibles and family-entertainment floor.
Westfarms serves a catchment that extends beyond Farmington and West Hartford to Simsbury and Avon, drawing from some of central Connecticut’s highest-income suburban communities. Interstate 84 and Route 9 provide the primary highway access, at the same Route 71 interchange the mall has used since 1974.
Westfarms’ resilience through the 2020 wave of anchor and mid-market closures, losing Lord & Taylor while keeping Nordstrom, adding a supermarket and a furniture anchor rather than leaving those boxes vacant, illustrates a pattern increasingly common among Simon’s stronger regional properties: backfilling department-store vacancies with categories that don’t compete directly with the surviving anchors, rather than searching for a like-for-like department store replacement.
