Drive the Parks Highway through Wasilla today and you'll pass a hotel with its structural frame standing but no guests inside, a furniture store that used to be a Walmart and then a Sears, and a sign for an infrared sauna studio that hasn't opened its doors yet. All of it sits inside the same stretch of pavement locals call Sun Mountain Center, and all of it is still, technically, under construction.
That's not a knock on the place. It's just later than anyone planned. Back in 2019, developer Cameron Johnson told Alaska Business Magazine the project was "on track to get this entire power center developed within a five to six year time frame." By that math, the build-out should have wrapped somewhere around 2024 or 2025. Instead, Wasilla is watching new tenants arrive in 2026, and at least one more phase is still rising out of the ground. If you've assumed Sun Mountain is basically done because Lowe's has been there for years, this fall is the reminder that it isn't.
What Opened First, and What Took Years Longer
The corridor didn't arrive all at once. It started with two tenants that Frontiersman coverage identified as the project's first: Sonic Drive-In and Planet Fitness. Sonic was Alaska's first location of the chain, owned by Larry Clark, and it reportedly broke multiple company sales records after opening in August of that first year. Planet Fitness followed as the corridor's other anchor.
From there, the lineup filled in gradually rather than in one build cycle:
- Lowe's Home Improvement, at 2561 East Sun Mountain Avenue
- Krispy Kreme, at 2141 East Sun Mountain Avenue
- Brown Jug, at 2451 East Sun Mountain Avenue
- Nuvision Federal Credit Union, whose Wasilla branch broke ground in September 2021 as the credit union's first stand-alone location in the state, positioned near Sonic, Sportsman's Warehouse, and Krispy Kreme
- First American Title, a more recent addition sitting next to available retail space still being marketed to tenants
Seven years after the first shovel, the tenant roster is still being written. That's a different story than "new shopping center opens," and it's the one worth paying attention to if you live nearby.
The Building With Three Names
The most visible sign of how much is still moving sits at the corner of the Parks Highway and Seward-Meridian Parkway, in a building most longtime Wasilla residents already know by heart. It opened decades ago as the town's original Walmart. When Walmart relocated across the highway, the same box became a Sears. When Sears wound down, the building sat empty for a stretch before Furniture Enterprises of Alaska, the parent company behind Sadler's Home Furnishings, brought it back to life.
FEA president Dave Cavitt had been eyeing the location for years before the deal closed, and once he got inside, the appeal was obvious.
"It was a great canvas. It's a very solid, concrete tilt-up construction."
Sadler's soft-opened in the space this past August. What makes the building worth watching now isn't just that one furniture store moved in. It's that Cavitt's company is stacking three separate retail concepts under a single roof: Sadler's Home Furnishings, an Ashley Homestore, and the company's first-ever Sadler's Outlet, both expected to open this fall. A building that has already worn a Walmart nameplate and a Sears nameplate is now home to three furniture brands at once, which may be the most retail identities any single address in Wasilla has cycled through in one generation.
A Hotel That Topped Off but Isn't Open
Not far from the furniture complex, Affinity Hospitality's Home2 Suites by Hilton is going up at 2242 East Tysons Trail. The four-story, 107-suite hotel reached what the construction industry calls "topping off" in May 2026, meaning the final structural beam was placed and the building's frame is complete. Topping off is a milestone, not a grand opening. Interior work, finishes, and staffing all still have to happen before anyone can book a room.
Official announcements from Affinity Hospitality point to a late 2026 opening. A commercial leasing listing for retail space near the site, dated earlier this year, instead references a 2027 opening for the hotel. The two don't agree, and there's no way to know which one holds until the doors actually open. Either way, if you've been wondering whether that hotel is running yet, the honest answer as of this fall is no. It's also worth noting the project carries a distinction beyond its room count: financing partners Northrim Bank and Nuveen Green Capital structured it as the first construction project in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough to use C-PACER financing, a relatively new tool for funding commercial builds through property assessments rather than conventional loans alone.
The Fitness Corridor Gets a Second Concept
Planet Fitness has anchored the corridor's workout options since the earliest phase of the project. This fall brings a different kind of studio into the mix. HOTWORX, a 24-hour infrared sauna fitness franchise, is opening its first Alaska location in Wasilla, with franchise owners Tracey Pidge and Ciara Boyce describing the move as a homecoming after years spent building HOTWORX studios in Washington state. Both grew up in Alaska before relocating, and the Wasilla studio is the first of five locations they've committed to opening statewide over the next several years.
It's a small addition next to a hotel frame and a furniture complex, but it fits the same pattern. Sun Mountain isn't adding one type of business and calling itself finished. It keeps layering in something new: a credit union, a title company, a furniture outlet, a hotel, a fitness concept nobody in Alaska had access to before this year.
Reading the Corridor Correctly
None of this means the project is behind in any way that matters to the people who live around it. Multi-phase commercial developments in a borough growing as fast as the Mat-Su often stretch past their original estimates, and a five-to-six-year plan landing closer to seven or eight isn't unusual for a project this size. What matters for anyone driving past regularly is knowing how to read what they're seeing. A topped-off frame is not an open hotel. A soft opening is not the full store lineup. A leasing sign for available retail space means the corridor still has room to grow, not that it's stalled.
The corridor's evolution is also a decent proxy for how much Wasilla itself has grown since the project broke ground. A power center originally anchored by a drive-in and a gym now includes a credit union with its own stand-alone branch, a title company, and a hotel built to a national brand standard. That's a different commercial footprint than what Wasilla had access to a decade ago, and it's still being written.
Watching a corridor like this fill in over years, not months, is part of what it means to actually know a place rather than just pass through it. That same kind of attention, tracking what's finished, what's promised, and what's still just a frame in the ground, is exactly what Top Homes Alaska brings to families and builders working through new construction across Wasilla and the rest of the Mat-Su Valley. If you're trying to make sense of what's actually built versus what's still on paper anywhere in the Valley, we're glad to walk through it with you.
