Could one of the biggest Rooms to Go in the country replace a beloved Kendall bookstore?
One of South Florida’s premier Barnes & Noble locations, a nearly 30-year-old Kendall Drive mall anchor, will turn its last page and could re-emerge as one of the largest Rooms to Go stores in the nation.
The details are in a preliminary site plan filed with Miami-Dade County in January.
Rooms to Go, based in Seffner, Florida, would take over the bookstore’s 3.8-acre space at the Kendall Village West shopping plaza at 12405 SW 88th St., according to the site plan and a letter of intent dated Jan. 29.
More steps are needed over the next several months for the furniture retailer to acquire the property from owners Elmore Associates. Under the plan, the bookstore would be demolished. The front parking lot, with about 140 spaces, would remain.
Details on the replacement Barnes & Noble
On Thursday, Janine Flanigan, a vice president of store planning and design for Barnes & Noble, confirmed the Kendall Village store will be vacating that location and has signed a lease to take over the former Forever 21 space at 8525 Mills Dr. at the Palms at Town & Country shopping plaza — one mile east, down the block in the same neighborhood.
“We are very fortunate to have found a new location nearby,” she said.
The new Barnes & Noble is tentatively scheduled to open in October. The existing Kendall Village B&N store will close at that time, Flanigan said.
The former Forever 21 space at Palms at Town & Country is sandwiched between a Nordstrom Rack and Lane Bryant and is near an Outback Steakhouse, MOD Pizza and other mall restaurants and shops.
The new Barnes & Noble will be smaller, about 20,000 square feet, “modeled in our new design,” Flanigan said in an email to the Miami Herald. “The building is a bit smaller, but the space is much more productive with our new fixturing.”
The new location will carry the same inventory mix as the existing West Kendall Barnes: books, toys, games and puzzles. The Palms at Town & Country Barnes & Noble will also include a B&N Café, Flanigan said. “The new design is beautiful, open and inviting.”
The departing 55,824-square-foot Barnes & Noble building at Kendall Village, which originally had an attached Michaels arts and crafts store that has since closed, opened Thanksgiving week in 1996. It was called “one of the biggest, flashiest Barnes & Noble bookstores in the nation” by the Miami Herald.
The new Rooms to Go showroom, with more than 51,000 square feet, would be considered a superstore — most other stores are in the 40,000 range.
Peter Weitzner, a Rooms to Go vice president, told the South Florida Business Journal the chain entered into a contract for the site because the space suited the company.
“We think this location is fantastic,” Weitzner said. “It’s an area we aren’t serving yet. We have been looking in the West Kendall area for a while and we feel like we have found an amazing spot.”
A nearby Rooms to Go
Since 2006, Rooms to Go has run a street-level store at the Toscano, a 25-story condo-retail development across the street from Dadeland Mall at 7360 North Kendall Dr. The furniture store is in walking distance from the busy Dadeland Publix and five miles east of the Barnes & Noble West Kendall space the chain seeks.
Rooms to Go executives didn’t respond to several phone calls from the Miami Herald seeking comment and more details.
Rooms to Go has 266 locations in the United States, 96 of those in the company’s home state of Florida, according to data tracker Scrape Hero.
In addition to Dadeland, Rooms to Go has stores in Doral, Hialeah and Cutler Bay in Miami-Dade. In Broward you’ll find the chain at Sawgrass Mills in Sunrise and in Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach and Pembroke Pines.
Barnes & Noble in the Miami area
Barnes & Noble has 659 stores in the U.S., 45 of them in Florida. There are 10 locations Miami-Dade and Broward, with The Shops at Sunset Place in South Miami and a Miracle Mile branch in Coral Gables about 30 minutes apart from one another by car.
In September 2024, the city of South Miami’s planning board green-lighted a plan to demolish Sunset Place mall at 5701 Sunset Dr. and replace the mostly deserted mall with a mixed-use complex over several years. That would likely mean the end of the sprawling two-story Barnes & Noble, on the corner of Sunset Drive and Red Road since 1999.
MORE: What is happening to Shops at Sunset Place? Future of South Miami mall takes new path
In addition to the bookstore, Kendall Village West also has a 16-screen Regal Cinemas movie theater, a Bahama Breeze restaurant facing North Kendall Drive, an Old Navy, LA Fitness, Chuck E. Cheese, a Gap and a Claire’s. Best Buy is next door in the West Kendall neighborhood.
An expanding bookstore chain?
The Barnes & Noble move to Palms at Town & Country with a modern store design comes as the chain is on an expansion kick around the country. That expansion comes despite trends favoring online book merchants like Amazon, e-book streaming sites like Audible or independent booksellers like Miami’s Books & Books that serve locals with events catering to the community like the annual Miami Book Fair.
“Barnes & Noble is opening stores across the country,” Flanigan said. “Our plan is to open 60-65 stores this year.”
In the first quarter of 2025, Barnes & Noble has opened eight new stores, she said, with the latest happening March 20 in Gainesville, Virginia.
Florida is part of the upswing trend. A new Barnes & Noble opened in Naples in January. A Tequesta store in Palm Beach County follows in late March.
“We have exciting plans in South Florida,” Flanigan said in an email earlier in the week, noting plans to open a store near The Falls off U.S. 1 in Colonial Palms Plaza in July.
“We are reviewing opportunities in other areas of Miami and South Florida,” she said.
The coming Colonial Palms Plaza store will be at 13605 S. Dixie Hwy. — about 20 minutes and 7 miles from the Kendall Village store.
Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt said in an interview with Fortune in 2024 that he runs the 659-store chain “more like a series of regional bookstores” rather than as centralized. Changes include more books and fewer tech items and toys that tend to push reading material off the shelves. He envisions more inviting layouts with “each store responsive to what local readers want.”
The coming 20,000 square-foot Barnes & Noble at Palms at Town & Country this fall seems to fit the chairman’s design plans.
“The new design is beautiful, open and inviting,” spokeswoman Flanigan said. “Each category has its own room which allows our booksellers to feature the very best of that section. The flow of the store is designed to take you on a journey of discovery, flowing from one section to another.”
Daunt told Publisher’s Weekly in January he wanted the re-surging chain that struggled through the pandemic and through shifting consumer habits to avoid “cookie-cutter stores,” and champions the trend of carrying special-edition books, much like an independent book shop.
This story was originally published March 20, 2025 at 9:46 AM.
