Walk past 2647 East Coast Highway this month and the first thing you notice is where the gate used to be. The Pacific Coast Highway entrance that generations of Corona del Mar residents have used to slip into Sherman Library & Gardens is closed. The way in now is around the corner, on Dahlia Avenue, marked by temporary signage instead of the wrought iron entrance everyone grew up with. Behind the fencing, a chunk of the 2.2-acre grounds sits closed off, and depending on the day you might hear a generator or a saw instead of the fountain.
None of that is the interesting part. Buildings get renovated. Fences go up. What's actually changed at Sherman is quieter than the construction noise, and it's permanent in a way the fencing isn't.
The Part That Ends in 2027
Sherman Library & Gardens turns 60 this year, and the nonprofit that runs it broke ground on February 26, 2026, at 2:26 p.m., a time and date the foundation chose deliberately for the pattern in the numbers, on the most significant rebuild in its history. The project is called Grow The Gardens, and it carries a $17 million price tag. Construction is expected to run about 18 months, which lands full completion in late summer 2027.
The plan includes a new Bell Tower Entrance and a revitalization of the garden areas across the campus, which is why the grounds feel smaller right now than they used to. Tim Collins, chairman of the building committee, has described the design intent as staying honest to the character of the CdM Village rather than building something flashier than the neighborhood around it.
Here's what hasn't moved during all of this: the gardens are still open daily, and the hours are still 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., seven days a week. General admission is still $5 per person, with kids under three admitted free. If you stopped by this summer for the new Dog Days of Sherman art exhibition, you already know the place is functioning through the construction, just on a smaller footprint than the one you remember.
That's the temporary story. Fences come down. Entrances move back. By late summer 2027, the version of Sherman most residents have in their heads should largely return.
The Part That Doesn't
What won't return is the restaurant.
For four years, the restaurant inside Sherman Gardens was 608 Dahlia, run by Chef Jessica Roy, who took the space over when longtime chef Pascal Olhats retired in 2021 and built a garden-to-table lunch spot that pulled ingredients straight from the beds outside its windows. The restaurant's lease at Sherman concluded on October 26, 2025, and Chef Roy's next project is a standalone space up the coast in Sunset Beach, not a return to the gardens once construction wraps.
This is the detail that's easy to miss if you only skim the headlines about the revitalization. The rebuild plan doesn't just pause the restaurant during construction. It relocates the restaurant permanently, moving it out to Pacific Coast Highway once the project is finished, so the central garden area it currently occupies can be turned over to educational programming instead. That's a specific architectural choice, not a byproduct of the construction timeline. Sherman is giving up interior square footage that used to seat lunch guests and handing it to classrooms and programming space.
Put another way: if you've been telling yourself you'll go back for a proper lunch at Sherman once the fences come down, that lunch spot inside the garden isn't part of the plan. The next restaurant on the property will sit outside the garden gates entirely.
Why a Botanical Garden Is Choosing Classrooms Over a Café
The city took a position on what Sherman is for earlier this year, when the Newport Beach City Council issued a proclamation naming Sherman Library & Gardens the cultural hub of Corona del Mar. That's a title given to a research library and a walking garden, not to a restaurant, and the building committee's choices during this rebuild track with it.
Sherman has always been two things stitched together: a library focused on the history of the Pacific Southwest, founded by Arnold Haskell in 1966 and named for his mentor Moses Hazeltine Sherman, and a botanical garden that grew out of Haskell acquiring the surrounding lots through the 1950s and 60s. The Grow The Gardens campaign, which launched in 2022, was built around the idea that the aging infrastructure was limiting what the nonprofit could do with education and preservation, not around adding amenities. A restaurant is an amenity. A classroom is the mission.
That's a useful thing to understand if you live nearby and have watched other landmarks in the neighborhood get reimagined mainly to add more of what visitors already show up for. Sherman is doing the opposite. It's shrinking the part of itself that generated foot traffic for its own sake and expanding the part that does the thing the nonprofit was actually founded to do.
What This Means for a Corona del Mar Saturday
If your usual weekend loop included ducking into Sherman for a walk through the tropical conservatory and then a biscuit at 608 Dahlia, that loop needs a new second half for now, and a permanently different one after 2027. The garden itself is still there. The lunch stop inside it is not, and it won't be back even when the fencing comes down for good.
A few things worth knowing if you're planning around the construction window:
- The Dahlia Avenue entrance is temporary and will shift once the Bell Tower Entrance construction finishes, expected late summer 2027
- Hours (10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. daily) and the $5 general admission are unchanged during construction
- The next restaurant tied to Sherman will open on Pacific Coast Highway after the project completes, outside the garden gates rather than inside them
- The garden space the old restaurant occupied is earmarked for education programming, not a replacement café
None of this is a reason to skip the gardens this year. It's a reason to walk in with the right expectations. The tide pools at Little Corona and the bluff walk toward Inspiration Point aren't going anywhere, and that circuit through the Flower Streets down to the water has never actually needed Sherman to be finished in order to work. What's changing is one specific stop on that loop, and it's changing for good, not just until the scaffolding comes down.
If you've lived in Corona del Mar long enough to remember Café Jardin before it was Cultivar before it was 608 Dahlia, this is the first time in a while that a change to that space isn't just a new chef taking over the same room. The room itself is being reassigned.
That kind of shift, where a beloved public space quietly trades a lunch crowd for a classroom, tends to say something about how a neighborhood values what's actually rare in it. In a Village with no shortage of restaurants along East Coast Highway, Sherman apparently decided its garden didn't need to be one more of them.
Whether you're watching this rebuild as a longtime CdM resident or thinking about what a thoughtful renovation says about a property's long-term value, the same instinct applies: the choices that matter are the ones that don't get reversed once the fences come down. If you're weighing a project of your own in Corona del Mar, from a light remodel to a full rebuild, and want an honest read on what will hold its value versus what's just temporary polish, Brian Liberto is a good person to call before you start. Let's Connect.
