Book lovers along Stevens Creek Boulevard could soon have a sprawling new place to browse the shelves. Barnes & Noble is moving to open a large bookstore in Cupertino, filing plans for a proposed 19,200-square-foot location at 20740 Stevens Creek Boulevard in the Crossroads shopping center, a storefront that has sat empty since early 2025. The project is under city review, and the company has not yet announced when the doors might open.
City documents confirm that building plans are in and list the space at 19,200 square feet, noting the storefront became available after Party City closed. According to the City of Cupertino, the application pegs the tenant-improvement work at about $520,000 and places the project in the city’s standard plan-review queue.
Part of a nationwide push
The Cupertino bid is one piece of Barnes & Noble’s broader comeback play. The chain has said it expects to open roughly 60 new stores in 2026 as it returns to markets it once served. Retail TouchPoints reports the expansion follows strong sales at existing locations and a strategy that leans on local booksellers to curate inventory and run in-store events.
How Barnes & Noble is reshaping stores
Under CEO James Daunt, Barnes & Noble has been pivoting toward smaller, community-focused layouts and using regional deals to strengthen its local footprint. Publishers Weekly detailed the company’s 2025 acquisition of Bay Area chain Books Inc., and the company’s own announcement highlights how it is testing different store sizes, including a roughly 7,000-square-foot Los Gatos shop that opened last year. In its opening-day writeup, Barnes & Noble described the downtown Los Gatos location and its community programming.
Local reaction
In the South Bay, the prospect of another big bookstore is drawing a mix of enthusiasm and measured watchfulness. “All reading is good reading,” Diane Roche of the Santa Clara County Library District told San José Spotlight. Local bookseller Eric Johnson told the outlet that Barnes & Noble’s return reflects readers’ appetite for the kind of in-person discovery you cannot get from a search bar. Audrey Guo, an economics professor at Santa Clara University, added that consumer demand for events, book clubs and curated selections is helping drive renewed investment in brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Retail churn on Stevens Creek
If it moves forward, the new bookstore would fill one of the larger empty boxes along Stevens Creek Boulevard, which has seen its share of anchor reshuffling. The Almaden Plaza Barnes & Noble closed in January 2025 and the space has since been re-leased to Sports Basement, a reminder of how big-box footprints are getting repurposed across the South Bay. Shelf Awareness reported on that closure and its aftermath.
City staff say the Barnes & Noble application will move through Cupertino’s standard plan-review process and that no opening date has been set. The City of Cupertino lists the project valuation at about $520,000 and notes that staff will evaluate the tenant-improvement plans as submitted. If approved, the new Barnes & Noble would join other recent retail arrivals and is likely to offer author events, storytimes and a mix of books and gifts similar to other recent Bay Area openings…