Drive east on Harding Pike toward White Bridge Road this month and the corner looks nothing like the one you grew up with. Where Belle Meade Plaza sat for sixty-four years, a construction pit now drops fifty feet below street grade, ringed by cranes and rebar cages climbing into concrete. The story most residents repeat about that hole is simple: Belle Meade Village is coming, and it opens in 2028. That date is accurate. It is also not the whole answer.
Buried in the same press releases and permit filings that produced the 2028 date is a second, quieter one: the residential towers going up on that site are expected to finish a full year earlier, in late 2027. That gap between two dates for the same project is the detail worth understanding if you live here, because it means the corner's identity crisis is likely to outlast some of the people who move into it.
What AJ Capital actually bought and when
Nashville-based AJ Capital Partners bought the 15.5-acre Belle Meade Plaza site, Kroger included, for $87 million in July 2023. Kroger had operated there since 1978 and closed for good in January 2024, followed out the door by Starbucks and the plaza's other longtime tenants. Demolition of the old shopping center began in March 2025. Formal construction started that October.
From there the site moved fast by construction standards. Crews spent November and December 2025 excavating and controlled-blasting the site down fifty feet to make room for a 900-space underground parking garage, with deep foundation work and crane installation following close behind. AJ Capital marked the final day of blasting on April 3, 2026, with a "Boom to Bloom" event that donated money to Friends of Warner Parks for every car that passed the site that day. Weekly overnight concrete pours began April 28 and ran for about six weeks. As of this writing, vertical concrete construction is underway across the site, which the developer's own project page still lists as a 2028 completion.
None of that is in dispute. What deserves more scrutiny is what "2028" is actually describing.
Two clocks, one project
The retail town square, financed alongside the residential towers by a $475 million construction loan AJ Capital closed in January 2026, is planned as seven two- and three-story buildings wrapped around a central courtyard, anchored by an antique carousel. The plan calls for more than 40 storefronts across roughly 160,000 square feet of leasable space, a members' club, a boutique hotel, and what the developer's materials describe as "world-class restaurants." Not one of those restaurants, shops, or retail brands has been named publicly. The loan itself is explicitly structured to cover future leasing and tenant improvement costs, which is a polite way of saying the tenant roster does not exist yet.
Contrast that with the residential half of the project, known as 1 Iris Lane. Two 46-unit buildings, 92 condos total, one to four bedrooms, averaging roughly 3,200 square feet, starting at $3 million. Sales tours out of the gallery at 4525 Harding Pike began in fall 2025, and by the time the construction loan closed in January 2026, 40 percent of those units were already pre-sold. Coverage of the residential component has pointed to a late 2027 completion, a full year ahead of the "2028" date attached to the whole village.
Put those two facts side by side and the picture changes. Belle Meade Village is not one project finishing on one day. It is a residential building with a firm buyer list and a faster construction schedule, sitting inside a retail concept that still has no announced tenants and a construction loan that treats leasing as a future expense. If that pattern holds, some of the first residents moving into $3 million condos at 1 Iris Lane could be doing so with a mostly empty courtyard outside their windows, not the finished retail village shown in the renderings.
That is not a criticism of the project. Complex mixed-use developments routinely deliver residential and retail on staggered timelines, and a five-acre private park is part of what those early residents are buying regardless of what surrounds it. It is simply the detail that gets lost when "2028" becomes shorthand for the whole thing, and it is the reason "when does the Kroger corner come back" does not have a single clean answer.
Where the errands actually went
While the site clears its own timeline, daily life around it has rearranged itself in ways worth knowing if you live nearby. Just up the road at the Woodmont and Harding intersection, Boyle Investment Co. acquired the two-building, 156,000-square-foot Woodmont Centre office complex in late December 2025. Boyle's existing Middle Tennessee portfolio runs through Berry Farms, Capitol View, and Meridian Cool Springs, among others, and the company has signaled capital improvements to a property first built in the 1980s. If you use that corner for offices, medical appointments, or a quick lunch, expect the tenant mix there to look different by the time Belle Meade Village opens its doors.
Locally, one small but telling piece of news: in mid-2025, Charlie and Andy Nelson took the Belle Meade Bourbon name back from their family's distillery, Nelson's Green Brier, and relaunched it under their own label. Two expressions are now on shelves, a Classic aged six to eight years and bottled at 45.2 percent ABV, and a Reserve aged seven to ten years at 54.15 percent. The initial market is Nashville, with expansion across Tennessee planned. It is a minor thing next to a $475 million construction loan, but the neighborhood's name is back on a bottle while its namesake shopping corner sits behind construction fencing, and the timing has not gone unnoticed by residents who have watched both stories unfold at once.
With the plaza corner offline, the calendar of neighborhood life has leaned harder on Warner Parks and Cheekwood for the season, including recurring events like the Full Moon Pickin' Party at the Percy Warner Park Equestrian Center. None of this replaces a grocery store. It does mean the version of "going out" that Belle Meade residents have practiced this year looks more like a park than a plaza.
The pushback that shaped the plan
The project has not moved forward without friction. A group of nearby residents pursued a lawsuit challenging the city's approval of sidewalk and site-plan changes tied to the redevelopment, arguing the process favored the developer's interests over neighborhood input. The plan itself has also been revised more than once to address density and environmental concerns raised by residents before permits for demolition and construction were finalized. Whatever side of that argument you land on, it is worth knowing the current plan is not the first version anyone proposed, and the version now under construction reflects real negotiation, not a design that arrived unopposed.
What to actually watch for next
If you want a way to track this yourselves without waiting on marketing updates, the two signals that matter most are permit activity and retail leasing announcements. Six additional building-core permits were sought in January 2026 following roughly $51 million in previously issued permits, and each new permit filing tends to mark a real construction milestone rather than a promotional one. On the retail side, the first named restaurant or shop lease is the detail that will tell you the courtyard concept has moved from rendering to reality. Until that name appears, the honest answer to "what's opening at the old Kroger" is still two words: not yet.
The corner will look different by this time next year, and different again the year after that. Whether it feels finished by 2028 may depend less on the residential tower's move-in date than on how quickly that second clock, the one nobody quotes, starts to move.
If you're weighing what a changing corner like this means for a home you already own in Belle Meade, or you're trying to time a purchase around a neighborhood in transition, The Luxe Collective works this market every week and can walk you through it. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
