Walk down Riverside Drive on the right Sunday and you will pass the certified farmers market winding down, its produce boxes thinning out by early afternoon, then find a second version of the day just getting started three blocks east. Behind a wrought iron gate at 10623 Riverside Drive, a 1929 Spanish villa that once counted Roy Disney among its residents has its courtyard doors open, its ground-floor rooms filled with vendors selling candle-flower bouquets and sourdough pizza, and someone reading poetry near the fountain. Neither the produce stand nor the poetry reading is new to Los Angeles on its own. What is new is that Toluca Lake now has both, on the same street, on the same day, running on two entirely different clocks.
That is the actual shift worth understanding this year. Not a restaurant opening, not a permit fight. The Village's single organized Sunday ritual, the one built around the certified farmers market near Talofa and Riverside, now has company. And the company keeps a schedule the produce market never has.
The Sunday the Neighborhood Already Knew
For years, Toluca Lake's Sunday has run on one clock: the certified farmers market that sets up along Riverside from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon, every week, all year. It is a produce-and-errand ritual built to structure a morning rather than fill an afternoon. You go early for the good tomatoes, you are usually home before noon, and the market asks nothing more of you than a canvas bag and enough cash for a vendor or two who still prefer it that way.
That rhythm has held so consistently that most residents do not experience it as a choice. It is simply what a Sunday morning here looks like, and until this year it was the Village's only regular weekend gathering, the one fixed point in an otherwise open day.
Then a Disney-Era Villa Reopened Its Gates
In May 2026, a very different kind of Sunday arrived a few blocks down Riverside. The house behind it is not new construction. It is the Bakman House, a 1929 Spanish-style villa that once belonged to Roy Disney and spent decades since as one of Toluca Lake's quieter architectural landmarks, largely out of public view, before Ashley Murphy and Sasha Kerbel took it on as founding partners and reopened it as Villa Blanca Lifestyle.
Murphy, who came to the project from Texas, has described the intent behind the restoration in fairly plain terms.
"I'm from Texas, and hospitality is a big deal for me, so I wanted to see more of that in the restaurant space, just that feeling of being at home, being welcomed, a come-and-stay sort of thing, where you know everybody, a central hangout."
The grand opening gala doubled as a benefit for the California Heritage Collective, which tells you something about how the founders wanted the house read from the start. Not as a rental property with a market bolted on for foot traffic, but as a restoration project that happens to open its doors to the neighborhood a few times a month.
That framing explains why the market itself does not run weekly. It sits on a biweekly cadence, every other Sunday afternoon, scheduled around the villa's broader calendar of weddings, rehearsal dinners, and content shoots rather than around any retail logic. This past summer's run included the Amalfi Summer Pop-Up Markets on July 12 and July 26, and as of this September the format is still appearing on citywide roundups of the better weekend outings in Los Angeles, which is a longer shelf life than most pop-up formats manage before quietly disappearing.
What Is Actually Inside the Gate
The ground-floor rooms and courtyard fill with local vendors selling accessories, candle-flower bouquets, and the kind of small-batch food that travels well: sourdough pizza by the slice, cookies, cupcakes, coffee poured as you wander from room to room. Live poetry turns up somewhere in the mix on a given Sunday, which is not a detail you find at a produce stand. None of it competes directly with the farmers market's tomatoes and stone fruit three blocks away. It is a different kind of Sunday altogether, closer to wandering through a friend's open house than working through a grocery list.
That distinction is worth sitting with. The two gatherings are not rivals for the same slice of the day. The farmers market is a morning obligation dressed up as a pleasure, the kind of thing you plan a week around out of habit. The villa market is an afternoon pleasure with no obligation attached at all, since the three-bedroom house behind it also functions as a working wedding and event venue, and the market itself is really a side door into a property that spends most of its calendar hosting private gatherings rather than public ones.
Two Clocks, One Street
Here is the part that changes how a Toluca Lake Sunday can actually be spent, on the Sundays when both are running. Morning starts at Talofa and Riverside, produce bag in hand, market packed up by two in the afternoon. Afternoon picks up three blocks down at the villa gate, no obligation to arrive by any set hour, no requirement to buy anything at all beyond a slice of pizza if the mood strikes. For the first time in a long stretch, the Village's Sunday has a second act, one that did not exist eighteen months ago.
That only holds on the villa's own Sundays, since the market runs every other week rather than every week. A schedule tied to a working event venue will shift around wedding season and private bookings in a way a produce market never does, so it is worth checking the current calendar before building a Sunday plan around it rather than assuming the old farmers-market rhythm applies.
What This Says About the Village
None of this is a story about development pressure or property values. Villa Blanca's business is events, not retail, and the Sunday market is a side door into a house that spends most of its calendar on weddings, rehearsal dinners, and film shoots rather than vendor tables. But the fact that a 1929 villa with an old Hollywood pedigree can now double as a neighborhood gathering spot, on a schedule that answers to weddings rather than commerce, says something true about how Toluca Lake tends to absorb change. The Village rarely tears anything down and starts over. More often it finds a second use for what is already standing, and asks residents to learn a new rhythm around it rather than a new address.
That is the actual news on Riverside Drive this year. Not a market. A second clock, ticking every other Sunday, inside a gate most of the Village had only ever seen from the sidewalk.
For more of what shapes daily life across Toluca Lake, Studio City, Sherman Oaks, and the rest of the Valley, Joan Duffy keeps a close watch on the small changes that end up mattering most. Let's Connect.
