If you drove down Willow Lawn Drive in June, you noticed the fencing. Three low-slung 1960s office buildings across from the shopping center are coming down, and the block will not look the same again in your ownership of your house. A few minutes south in Malvern Gardens, a red-glow sign flipped on in January above the old Lafayette Pharmacy building. And on Augusta Avenue, a second crane project is queued up behind Gold's Gym.
Taken one at a time, each of these reads as a local news blip. Taken together, they show something specific about this block: the twenty-year rezoning of Willow Lawn stopped being a document and started being a construction schedule. This post walks through what a resident can actually see, taste, and route around this summer, and what the sequencing tells you about the next two years on your street.
The Willow Circle Fence Is The Real Story On Willow Lawn Drive
The project is called Willow Circle, and it is the one that changes your commute first.
Demolition started in recent weeks for Willow Circle, a 228-unit apartment building that will replace three 1960s-era office buildings at 1506-1510 Willow Lawn Drive. Named for a residential cul-de-sac that preceded the office buildings, Willow Circle is a joint venture between Thalhimer Realty Partners and the Crenshaw family, who own the buildings and manage them through their Crenshaw Realty firm. That reporting is from Richmond BizSense in early May 2026, and the timeline it lays out matters if you live within earshot of the site.
Here is what the approved plan actually delivers, in the terms a neighbor cares about:
| Element | What Willow Circle Includes |
|---|---|
| Height | 7 stories, across from Kroger |
| Units | 228, one- and two-bedroom, evenly split |
| Average unit size | 675 sf for the 1BR, 994 sf for the 2BR |
| Projected rent range | $1,650 to $2,850, market-rate |
| Parking | A 360-space deck, about 1.5 spaces per unit, with the apartments wrapped around the deck to shield it from Willow Lawn Drive |
| Development cost | $63 million |
| Target completion | Spring 2028 |
The parking ratio is the number worth staring at. The ratio of parking spaces per apartment was increased at the request of the planning commission, which tells you the county heard the parking-spillover complaint from the Pulse stop and answered it in writing before approving the plan. The wrap design is the other tell. A seven-story parking deck hidden behind residential frontage is a different streetscape than an exposed garage, and it is the design choice that most affects what you see when you walk out for coffee.
The bench underneath the project is the transit stop. The 7-story companion building the same partners had planned on Byrd Avenue is on hold while GRTC and Henrico plan to extend the Pulse bus line as far west as Parham Road, where a new western terminus is being planned. So the second tower is not dead. It is paused until the county knows where the western end of rapid transit lands. If you live near Byrd, that answer is coming from the transit plan, not the developer.
The design language is also worth naming. Poole & Poole Architecture is designing Willow Circle, KBS is the general contractor, Kimley-Horn is the engineer, and SMBW is developing branding and designing the amenities, which will include a pool, sky lounge, library and grilling areas. The design nods to the mid-century modern history of the site and the Willow Lawn area, with planned interior accents including vintage furniture and fixtures, wood paneling, and record players and rotary phones. Whatever you make of vintage rotary phones as an amenity, the point is that the building is being positioned as native to Willow Lawn, not dropped in from Scott's Addition.
The Dinner Grid Just Shifted South
The other January change is a five-minute drive from the shopping center.
Lafayette Tavern, the latest establishment from the Giavos family of restaurateurs, debuted Wednesday, Jan. 14, at 1011 Lafayette St. For one of Richmond's most prolific restaurant families, Lafayette Tavern is the first opening since the 2024 loss of matriarch Stella Dikos, whose influence anchors the block. The building is the former Lafayette Pharmacy, and it sits next door to the original Stella's Grocery and across from Stella's the restaurant, so the Malvern Gardens corner now runs Greek, market, and American chophouse in a walkable line.
The menu is the plainest way to describe the room:
- Casual side: burger $22, prime rib French dip $28, chopped salad $16, Guinness $9, Negroni $16
- Occasion side: bone-in ribeye $85, oysters on the half shell $17, Scottish salmon $29, bottle of vintage Dom Pérignon $425
- Dinner service is 5 to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday; the bar stays open until 11 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and 11:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday
The chef signal is worth reading. The chophouse menu is led by chef Bobo Catoe Jr., and the kitchen runs a Montague broiler, the same type found in New York's legendary Peter Luger Steak House, a beast of a machine that cranks out 800-plus degrees of intense heat. That is a piece of equipment, not a marketing line. It tells you the steak program is the anchor and the rest of the menu is built around it.
Why this matters for a Willow Lawn resident specifically. The block lost a familiar option last fall. Amigos Family Restaurant, a Mexican spot near Willow Lawn that had built a following in its 10 years, abruptly closed in the fall of 2025. Nothing has moved into that footprint yet, which is why the neighborhood's dinner grid has felt one seat short since October. Lafayette Tavern does not replace Amigos in kind, but it does add the one thing the immediate area was thinnest on: an occasion room within a short drive that is not downtown and not Short Pump. The Giavos family already runs Sidewalk Cafe, Galley, The Continental Westhampton, The Continental Manchester, Little Nickel, Kuba Kuba and Perly's, so the front-of-house standard is not the thing under test here.
The Twenty-Year Plan Behind Everything Else
Willow Circle and the Malvern Gardens corner are the visible pieces. The larger frame is a rezoning most residents have never read.
Willow Lawn Shopping Center covers around 37 acres near the Richmond-Henrico line, and for at least the third time in its history it is being eyed for a major transformation. Owner Federal Realty Investment Trust unveiled a long-term plan to redevelop the shopping center and its 37 acres into a new mixed-use district, that over time could include over 2,200 residential units and 500,000 square feet of commercial space. The plan does not touch every tenant at once. The Gold's Gym, Ross Dress For Less and Michaels buildings and surrounding 8 acres would be redeveloped to house 715 residential units and 34,000 square feet of retail space. The Kroger and Dick's Sporting Goods sites would be transformed to include 120 apartments and 140,000 square feet of commercial space. The redevelopment would break the property down into 11 mixed-use areas to be built in phases over a stretch of 20 to 30 years.
So Kroger is not going anywhere in the near term, and neither is the Dick's box. The phasing is the point. Federal Realty gets to move as leases roll.
Two smaller projects have already threaded through that framework:
- The Augusta Avenue building. New York-based Aurelie Capital is looking to build an eight-story apartment building at 4907-4911 Augusta Ave. The 188-unit structure would replace a one-story office building that's currently on the site next to the Gold's Gym at the shopping center. The building would count 120 one-bedroom and studio apartments plus 68 two-bedroom units, with no commercial space planned, and amenities would include a pool and 188 parking spaces, 176 of which would be in a sub-surface parking deck.
- The Broad Street bridge project. Commissioners voted unanimously in favor of a plan to replace the 60-year-old, three-story Commonwealth Building, at 4605, 4623 and 4625 W. Broad St., with a six-story building with 155 apartments and eight so-called "live-work" units, which would double as both an office and residence for tenants.
Between Willow Circle, Aurelie's Augusta Avenue tower, the Commonwealth Building replacement, and the Federal Realty phases, the number of new residential doors within a ten-minute walk of the Pulse stop is on track to move from a few hundred to a few thousand over the next decade. That does not require you to have an opinion on density. It just means the sidewalk math on your block is changing, and the timeline is now printed.
What A Resident Actually Feels This Summer
Set aside the pipeline for a second and look at July.
The Willow Circle fence is up. You will hear demolition and see haul-off traffic on Willow Lawn Drive through late summer, and the site will stay active until spring 2028. Kroger, Dick's, Gold's Gym, Ross, and Michaels are all still where they were. The Pulse stop is still where it was. The Aurelie building on Augusta is approved but has not broken ground. The Byrd Avenue tower is paused pending the Pulse extension decision toward Parham Road.
The dinner rotation gained one room and lost one. Lafayette Tavern is the new anchor five minutes south, running Wednesday through Sunday. Amigos is dark. Everything else on your usual list, from Taco Bamba to Stella's to the Continental Westhampton, is unchanged.
If you have been in this house for a while, the practical read is that Willow Lawn is transitioning from a shopping center with a bus stop to a transit-oriented district with a shopping center inside it, and 2026 to 2028 is the loudest stretch of that transition. Property values around a Pulse stop with 2,000 new apartments in the pipeline behave differently than property values around a strip mall, and that is a conversation worth having before the fencing comes down, not after.
If you would like to know what these shifts mean for your specific block, or what your home would be worth against the current backdrop rather than the 2019 one, Adam Tuck at Option 1 Realty has been reading these projects since the first rezoning was filed. Start Saving Today — Get Your Free Market Analysis.
