Belle Meade Is Rebuilding Its Gateway Twice, And The Two Projects Don't Share A Calendar

Drive east on Harding Pike toward White Bridge Road this month and you will pass a fifty-foot excavation ringed by cranes, with concrete now rising where the old Belle Meade Plaza used to sit. Most residents have absorbed the same shorthand version of what's happening there: the Village is coming, the Kroger will come back, and both will happen around the same time. That shorthand is wrong on the second half, and understanding why matters more than watching the cranes.

The construction site at the old Plaza and the future home of your grocery store are not the same project. They sit half a mile apart on the same road, belong to two different developers working from two different sets of financing, and only one of them currently has a finish line.

Two Sites, Half A Mile Apart

The site everyone is watching is the former Belle Meade Plaza, now called Belle Meade Village, at 4525 Harding Pike. AJ Capital Partners bought the 15.5-acre parcel and has moved through demolition, controlled blasting, and into vertical concrete construction. The blasting phase wrapped on April 3, 2026, and AJ Capital marked the milestone with a "Boom to Bloom" giveback that funneled donations to Friends of Warner Parks for native plant conservation. Barings supplied a $475 million construction loan to build the project, which is set to include 92 condominiums at an address called 1 Iris Lane, a retail town square, and a five-acre private park tied into a restored stretch of Richland Creek. Completion is targeted for 2028.

The grocery store is a separate story. When the Belle Meade Kroger closed on January 17, 2025, after operating from its Harding Pike location since 1978 longer than any other Kroger west or southwest of downtown, the plan was for it to relocate into the former Harris Teeter space inside the old Belle Meade Theater building at 4301 Harding Pike. That property has a different owner, Ridgefield Properties, working through a ground lease with Bradford Allen and Southeastern Development on a six-story building that would put a 56,300-square-foot Kroger on the ground floor beneath 236 apartments. It went through its own rezoning fight in the fall of 2023, with longtime resident Irvin Venick telling a local TV crew the project raised real concerns: "traffic concerns that have to be addressed, there are access concerns, there are design concerns." As of the most recent public reporting, Kroger has not announced a construction timeline or an opening date for that space.

So the neighborhood is watching one project with a loan, a contractor, and a 2028 target, and waiting on a second project that has permission but no announced schedule. Conflating the two makes the wait feel more coordinated than it is.

What's Actually Rising Right Now

At the Village site, the sequence has been demolition in spring 2025, excavation and blasting from November 2025 through early April 2026 to carve out space for a 900-space underground garage, and now vertical concrete on two 46-unit residential buildings designed by Meyer Davis. Units at 1 Iris Lane start around $3 million and were reported as roughly 40 percent pre-sold as of January 2026, with Fridrich & Clark Realty handling pre-sales for the residential component. The retail portion is planned around seven buildings arranged near a central courtyard, with more than 40 storefronts eventually opening around it, though none of that retail is open yet and none of it has announced tenants.

The Grocery Store Still Doesn't Have A Date

This is the part that gets lost when people talk about "the Village" as one project. The Kroger that closed in January 2025 is not moving into the Village. It's slated to move into the separate building half a mile up the road, the one with the art deco marquee left over from the Belle Meade Theater's 1940 opening. That project needed its own rezoning, drew its own round of neighborhood meetings over traffic and design, and as of the most recent reporting still has no disclosed move-in date from Kroger. A spokesperson for the company has said only that a date and a cost for the relocation have not been finalized.

Practically, that means the return of a grocery store on Harding Pike is not pegged to 2028. It could happen sooner if the Theater site's owners break ground quickly, or it could lag well past the Village's opening if financing or permitting slows it down. The two clocks are not synchronized, and nothing in the public record ties them together.

A Quieter Change Two Blocks Away

The Harding Pike corridor is shifting in a third place that has drawn far less attention. In December 2025, Boyle Investment Co. acquired Woodmont Centre, the two-building office complex at 102 and 104 Woodmont Boulevard, sitting at the Woodmont and Harding intersection. The complex dates to the 1980s, and Boyle has signaled capital improvements are coming. Boyle's existing Middle Tennessee portfolio runs through Berry Farms, Capitol View, CityPark Brentwood, McEwen Northside, and Meridian Cool Springs. If you use that stretch of Harding for offices, medical appointments, or a lunch spot, expect the tenant mix there to look different by the time either Harding Pike project finishes.

Put together, the corridor isn't being rebuilt to one plan. It's being rebuilt by three separate owners on three separate schedules, each responding to their own site and their own math.

Where Fall Actually Happens While You Wait

None of this changes what a Belle Meade weekend looks like this season, because the neighborhood's actual gathering points were never inside the Plaza to begin with. Percy Warner Park's Equestrian Center hosts its Full Moon Pickin' Party on Friday, September 25, the last one before the calendar turns toward the November events. Belle Meade Historic Site & Winery keeps live music going on its grounds Friday through Sunday from April through November, a dependable option once the September heat breaks.

The two fixed points on the fall calendar are both at the Historic Site. Trick-or-Treat at Belle Meade returns on Halloween with costumed kids' activities and a Build-Your-Own Bourbon Cocktail Station from Bonnie's Bourbon & Wine Bar for the adults. The Holiday Open House follows in mid-November, typically running 5 to 8 p.m. with visits from Santa, Mrs. Claus, and Elsa. Both events are free and open to the public.

If your Saturday routine used to include a coffee run and an errand loop through the Plaza, that loop doesn't exist right now and won't reappear in its old form. The honest replacement is the one already working: the Warner Parks trailheads, the Nature Center's programming, and the winery's weekend hours.

The Takeaway Worth Keeping

The gateway to Belle Meade is being rebuilt, but it's being rebuilt as two unrelated projects wearing one shared nickname. The Village has a loan, a contractor, and a 2028 date. The grocery store has a plan and no date at all. Treating them as one countdown will leave you guessing wrong about when either one actually opens. Treating them as what they are, two separate bets on the same half mile of road, is the more useful way to watch the corridor change.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans on this side of Nashville, whether that's timing a move around the corridor's changes or understanding how a project like 1 Iris Lane fits into the broader Belle Meade market, Beth Molteni can walk through what the redevelopment is likely to mean for property values and timing on either side of Harding Pike. Schedule a consultation to talk through it.