The Corner of Sunrise and Kolb Explains How the Catalina Foothills Actually Grows
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Most neighborhoods measure growth in new construction. Cranes, ribbon cuttings, a shopping center rising out of what used to be scrub and gravel. The Catalina Foothills isn't doing that this year. Instead, the same family that already owns a restaurant at Sunrise and Kolb just opened a second one on that same corner, in a building somebody else walked away from.
That's not a coincidence. It's a pattern, and once you see it, you'll notice it everywhere from La Encantada to St. Philip's Plaza.
If you've driven past Sunrise and Kolb this year, you've watched Commoner & Co. become something else. Owner Nathan Ares moved his upscale foothills restaurant to Gilbert last summer, leaving a 3,500-square-foot space empty on one of the busiest corners in the Foothills. Ray Flores, president of Flores Concepts (the family behind El Charro Café, Charro Steak & del Rey, and downtown's The Monica) didn't have to think hard about what to do with it.
His family already runs El Charro Ventana at 6910 E. Sunrise Drive, on the same intersection. Rather than expand somewhere new, Flores took over the empty building at 6960 E. Sunrise and opened The Hills by Monica there this spring.
"We wanted to be more in sync on that corner," Flores said.
The Hills isn't a bet on a new part of town. It's a bet on a corner the family already owns a piece of, doubled.
The Hills seats 120 inside and another 20 on a patio with Santa Catalina views, serving pancakes and brick-oven pizza alongside a full bar and coffee program. Dinner plates run $20 to $30, with lunch priced lower and mimosas set below what the nearby resorts charge. Flores told the Tucson Spotlight the name is a nod to Catalina Foothills High School, whose teams are known locally as the Hills. Muralist Joe Pagac contributed work to the space, alongside decor inspired by Foothills painter Ted DeGrazia, so the design leans into neighborhood identity rather than importing something generic.
If you're a longtime resident, the practical read is simple: Sunrise and Kolb now has two restaurants from the same kitchen family on the same intersection, which means more overlap in hours (brunch at one, dinner at the other) and less reason to drive across town for either.
Walk or drive west on Sunrise and you'll hit a second example of the same instinct, just with coffee instead of tacos. In January, Presta Coffee moved into a former Starbucks building at 4700 E. Sunrise Drive, its fourth location in the Tucson area. The menu runs from matcha lattes and cold brew to pour-over coffee sourced from Ethiopia and Colombia.
Notice what didn't happen. Nobody built a new coffee shop. A national chain vacated a purpose-built drive-through box, and a Tucson-founded company filled it within the same footprint. That's the second data point in a pattern: Foothills growth this year isn't new square footage, it's local operators occupying real estate that already exists.
La Encantada, the open-air luxury center at Skyline and Campbell, tells a version of the same story from the retail side. The center opened in the early 2000s as the only luxury shopping destination in the Tucson region, anchored by AJ's Fine Foods, Crate & Barrel, and Pottery Barn. No new wing has gone up since. What's changed in 2026 is who's inside the existing wings: Eileen Fisher signed on, and The Tox opened its doors on February 28.
Put the three data points next to each other and the pattern gets hard to miss. A family restaurant group consolidating around one intersection. A local coffee brand backfilling a vacated national chain's building. A twenty-year-old shopping center swapping tenants rather than expanding its footprint. None of it is sprawl. All of it is density, added to corners the Foothills already knew.
Not everything changing in the Foothills this year is a new name. Some of it is a schedule you might have forgotten to check. The weekend market at St. Philip's Plaza, running since 2012 under towering sycamores and cobblestone paths, keeps a seasonal clock most visitors don't think about until they show up at the wrong time. From October through April, vendors set up 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. From May through September, the market opens at 8 and wraps by noon, beating the heat rather than fighting it.
If you've stopped by this August expecting the leisurely fall pace and found the booths already breaking down, that's not a fluke. It's the same market, running on the schedule it's kept for years. Worth building your Saturday morning around the earlier start while summer hours hold.
The live-music side of Foothills life follows the same infill logic. Nobody built a new concert hall. Existing venues just booked more into the calendars they already had:
That last date is still ahead of you. If you've been meaning to catch a show without driving downtown, it's on the calendar three weeks out.
Here's the thesis, stated plainly. The Catalina Foothills isn't expanding outward this year. It's getting denser at the corners it already had: Sunrise and Kolb, La Encantada, St. Philip's Plaza. If your daily radius already includes one of those three, your options just multiplied without your commute changing at all. If it doesn't, not much has shifted for you yet, and that's useful to know too. You're not missing a wave of new development spreading across the neighborhood. You're watching a handful of familiar addresses get used more fully than they were a year ago.
That's a different kind of growth than most guides to a neighborhood describe, and it's the kind that rewards paying attention to specific corners rather than the Foothills as one undifferentiated map.
We track these shifts because they tell us something real about how a neighborhood is used, not just how it's zoned. If you're curious what a specific pocket of the Foothills, whether that's the Sunrise corridor, the streets around La Encantada, or somewhere else entirely, actually looks like day to day, Urban Oak Partners keeps closer tabs on this than the portals do. And whenever you're ready to talk about what any of it means for your own address, our door's open for that conversation too.
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