Walk into the Schnucks at 8867 Ladue Road this month and the first thing you notice is the light. New ceiling, new fixtures, new flooring that actually reflects it. The deli cases up front now show off ready-to-eat trays instead of hiding them behind fogged glass. The checkout lanes multiplied, half of them self-service. If you've shopped here for years, it feels like someone rebuilt your kitchen while you were on vacation and only told you when you walked in.
That's roughly what happened. Schnucks finished a total-store remodel this spring, with a ribbon-cutting on May 1 and a weekend of events that included a bourbon-and-wine "Taste & Toast" for the adults and a family sample day the next afternoon. The store has served Ladue since 1962 and has sat at this exact address since 1993. It employs 156 people. None of that changed. What changed is everything inside the walls: new refrigerated cases across dairy, frozen, meat and produce, an updated floral department, and an expanded area built for Schnucks Delivers and curbside pickup, the kind of infrastructure a grocery chain adds when it expects you to keep shopping there for another thirty years, not just this one.
Here's what the remodel coverage didn't mention, because it wasn't the story they were telling: six doors down, at Colonial Marketplace, nothing moved at all.
The Storefronts That Didn't Move
Colonial Marketplace sits directly next to the Schnucks, close enough that you can walk from one parking lot to the other without touching Ladue Road. While the grocery store spent months mid-renovation, the small businesses lining that strip kept their doors open the entire time, the way they have through every previous cycle of change at this corner.
A few of the tenants worth knowing by name if you don't already:
- Marmi Shoes, a family business now in its fourth generation, with more than a century in the shoe trade
- City Sprouts, an independently owned kids' boutique that's been outfitting Ladue babies and toddlers since 2005
- Ivy Hill Boutique, which started in Columbus, Ohio in 2008, moved to St. Louis a year later, and has called this stretch of Ladue Road home for well over a decade
- Byrd Designer Consignment, the go-to for pre-owned Chanel, Dior and the like among shoppers who'd rather resell than donate
- Blown Away Blow Dry Bar, one of the center's original tenants and still one of its busiest
- IV Nutrition, Extra Virgin: An Olive Ovation, Cassie's Fragrance Boutique & Scent Bar and YLANG YLANG, rounding out a mix that's more locally owned than the polished exterior might suggest
None of these are new. Most predate the current Schnucks remodel by years, some by more than a decade. That's the part worth sitting with: the businesses that make this corner feel established are the ones that never had to reinvent themselves. The anchor is what keeps getting rebuilt.
A Strip That's Been Rebuilt Before
This isn't the first time. The building that now holds the Colonial Marketplace boutiques started life in 1960 as the Lammert Center, a furniture store that eventually failed, followed by an antique mall that failed too. By the late 2000s it was blighted enough that the DESCO Group bought it out of foreclosure in September 2011 and rebuilt it from the ground up, a project that qualified for financial assistance as a Community Improvement District because of how far the property had fallen. The renovation wrapped in November 2013, complete with a new mansard roof, brass door hardware, and a service road built specifically to connect the boutique strip to the Schnucks-anchored Ladue Crossing next door.
| Year | What Happened | Who Was Already There |
|---|---|---|
| 1960 | Lammert Center opens as a furniture store on Ladue Road | Nothing that's still there today |
| 2011–2013 | DESCO buys the blighted property, rebuilds it as Colonial Marketplace | Early tenants like Blown Away and Ivy Hill move in during the rebuild |
| 2026 | Schnucks completes a full remodel of the adjacent anchor store | Marmi Shoes, City Sprouts, Byrd and others, all still operating next door |
Line those three moments up and the pattern is obvious. Roughly every dozen years or so, something at this corner gets torn down and rebuilt. What survives each cycle isn't the architecture. It's the specific small businesses that decided this particular half-acre of Ladue Road was worth staying on, through a blighted furniture store, a construction-zone rebuild, and now a grocery store gutted down to its refrigeration lines.
What This Means If You Live Here
If your errand loop already runs through this corner, not much changes practically. The Schnucks checkout lines should move faster now that half of them are self-service, and the floral department is worth a second look if you haven't been in since the spring. The boutiques you already frequent, whether that's a shoe repair at Marmi or a consignment drop at Byrd, are exactly where you left them.
What's actually useful to know is less about any single storefront and more about how this stretch of Ladue Road works. It's rebuilt itself from blight before. It just did it again, quietly, one anchor tenant at a time, while the small businesses around it kept the lights on and the regulars coming back. That's not a coincidence. It's closer to a pattern, and it's one worth remembering the next time something on this block looks like it's closing for good. On this stretch of Ladue Road, that's rarely the end of the story.
If you're the kind of person who notices this stuff, who tracks which storefronts have stuck around and which corners keep getting reinvented, you already understand something about Ladue that doesn't show up on a map. Thompson & Richardson spend a lot of time paying attention to exactly this kind of detail, on this street and every other one in Ladue and Clayton. If you've got a question about what's changing in your own corner of town, or you're just curious what a home nearby is actually worth these days, reach out. We're happy to talk, no obligation required.
