The Old Belle Meade Plaza Isn't Becoming a Shopping Center Again. Here's What It's Actually Becoming.

"I miss the Kroger store; I miss the Hallmark store. They're still both available but several miles up the highway. I can't just run over here from home in five minutes."

That's Lynette Towns, a Belle Meade resident, describing the corner of Harding Pike and White Bridge Road to a WKRN reporter last fall. She was talking about a strip mall that closed in pieces, starting with Kroger in January 2024, and is now a fifty-foot excavation pit behind a chain-link fence. If you drive that stretch of Harding regularly, you already know the feeling she's describing. What most people don't know yet is that the thing rising in that hole isn't designed to give her Saturday errand loop back.

I've been tracking the public filings, financing announcements, and construction updates on this site because half my clients on this side of town ask me about it before we talk about anything else. Here's where it actually stands, and why the finished product will solve a different problem than the one everyone's waiting on.

Further along than the fence line suggests

The project is called Belle Meade Village, developed by AJ Capital Partners on the 15.5-acre site at Harding Pike and White Bridge Road. It's easy to assume it just started. It hasn't.

The loudest, most disruptive phase, the blasting that took the site fifty feet below grade to make room for that parking garage, wrapped in early April. AJ Capital marked the last blast with a campaign called "Boom to Bloom," donating to Friends of Warner Parks for every car that passed the intersection that day and handing out Fox's Donut Den vouchers to drivers stopped during the final blasting hold. What you're seeing now from the road, cranes and rising concrete, is the quieter half of the build.

The green space bet

Here's the detail that changes how you should think about this site: roughly 60 percent of the acreage is planned as green space, public walkway, or park, not retail. That includes a five-acre private park and the activation of Richland Creek, which will connect across White Bridge Road to the Richland Creek Greenway and from there to Sylvan Park and McCabe Park.

AJ Capital's own framing makes the priority explicit. CEO Ben Weprin described the project as one that will "redefine the gateway to one of Nashville's most established neighborhoods, turning an underutilized site into a community-driven destination," adding that the team is "using the neighborhood's history as our guide to create an authentic destination that both enhances the surrounding area and becomes a meaningful part of its future."

A grocery-anchored strip center doesn't need a five-acre park or a creek restoration to function. A luxury condo development does, because the park is an amenity for the people living there, not a replacement for the Kroger that used to anchor the block.

What's actually going in

The retail component is real, but it's built at a different scale than what it replaced. Seven two- and three-story buildings will hold roughly 40 storefronts arranged around a central courtyard anchored by an antique carousel, alongside a private members' club and a boutique hotel. AJ Capital's materials describe it as a mix of local and global retailers, restaurants, and daily services.

The residential piece is where the real signal sits. Called 1 Iris Lane, it's two 46-unit condominium buildings, 92 units total, one to four bedrooms, averaging about 3,200 square feet, with a starting price now at $3 million per unit, up from the $2.5 million floor first reported when the project broke ground. As of the loan closing in January, the units were reported roughly 40 percent pre-sold. The amenity list gives you a sense of who this is built for:

• A 16,000-square-foot amenity floor with a library, piano room, and screening room
• A golf simulator, wine room, and separate whiskey and cigar rooms
• Private Mahjong and poker rooms
• A fitness center, Pilates studio, sauna, and cold plunge
• A saltwater pool with cabanas and a private treatment room

The name itself is a nod to Nashville's 1930s nickname, "Iris City," earned when a group of Belle Meade residents cultivated award-winning iris cultivars and helped get the flower named Tennessee's state flower in 1933. Design firm Meyer Davis, whose founders Will Meyer and Grace Davis grew up in Nashville, has said the buildings draw on the neighborhood's equestrian architecture, dry-laid stone walls and split-rail fencing translated into the residential exteriors.

Why the errand loop doesn't come back

Put the pieces together and the shape of the finished project is closer to a private residential park with boutique shops attached than a public shopping center with apartments on top. Ninety-two residences starting at $3 million, set beside a five-acre private park, make the residential side the center of gravity for the whole site.

That's not a knock on the project. It's a different product solving a different problem, built for buyers paying $3 million and up for a golf simulator and a five-acre park, not for a resident who needs to grab a birthday card and a rotisserie chicken in the time between school pickup and dinner. Neighbors quoted in that same WKRN piece read the tradeoff both ways. Will Hawkins, who lives nearby, said he thinks "it will be an overall improvement" and that "change is tough for people, especially people who have lived in the same area for a long time, and I think ultimately change is good if it's well planned." Gracy Henderson, who works nearby at the Holistic Connection, described the corridor as "an area I have known to be kind of more upscale and nicer" that had "been a little bit neglected the past few years."

The practical takeaway for anyone who lives in this part of Belle Meade is that the errand geography you build around Kroger and Hallmark several miles up Harding isn't a two-year workaround. It's likely the new normal, even after the ribbon cutting in 2028.

What's actually open right now

While the construction runs its course, the neighborhood's fall calendar hasn't moved. The Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery has a full slate of programming through the season: a Pumpkins & Petals painting and pumpkin-decorating evening on October 1, an Autumn Wreath Workshop with Apple & Dove Flower Co. on October 18, a Tennessee STEAM Festival day on October 10 with mansion tours built into the schedule, and its free Trick-or-Treat event on October 25 with hayrides, a hay maze, and therapy pets. None of that is new because of the construction across the street. It's just the part of the neighborhood's calendar that was never tied to a shopping center in the first place, and it's worth treating as a standing weekend option rather than something reserved for out-of-town guests.

The site at Harding and White Bridge will look different by this time next year, and different again by 2028. What it becomes won't be a rerun of what it was. Knowing that now is more useful than waiting for a grocery run that isn't coming back to that corner.

If the shifting corridor has you thinking about what it means for your own street, your home's setting, or the timing of a move you've been weighing, I'm always glad to talk it through. Reach out to the Suzy Mills Team and let's figure out what it means for you.