Belle Meade Village Cleared Its Loudest Milestone. The Slow Part Starts Now
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
For the better part of five months, anyone driving through the intersection of Harding Pike and White Bridge Road knew when a blast was coming. Crews would hold traffic, count down, and send a controlled charge fifty feet into bedrock to carve out space for what will eventually be a 900-space underground garage. On April 3, 2026, that phase ended. AJ Capital Partners marked the occasion with a public giveback, donating to Friends of Warner Parks for every car that passed the site that day and handing out vouchers to Fox's Donut Den for anyone stopped during the final blasting hold.
It made for a nice civic moment. It also created a misleading impression. A lot of residents now assume the disruptive part of Belle Meade Village is behind them because the loudest part is. It isn't. The blasting was the fast, visible phase. What comes next, cranes and vertical concrete work stretching toward a late 2027 residential completion and a full 2028 buildout, is the slow, structural phase, and it is the one that will actually define how this corner feels to live near for the next year and a half.
The Belle Meade Kroger at 4560 Harding Pike had been there since 1978. AJ Capital bought the 10.1-acre Belle Meade Plaza site for $87 million in July 2023, then added a neighboring five-acre parcel for $1 million, bringing the footprint to 15.5 acres. Kroger initially set a January 31, 2025 closing date, then moved it up to January 17 after inventory sold off faster than expected. Katy's Hallmark had already moved out that September. Starbucks, Agave's, Ninki, Belle Meade Premium Cigars, and the Vanderbilt Health clinic followed, all displaced ahead of demolition in the spring.
Demolition of the Kroger building began in March 2025. By that October, AJ Capital had mobilized for construction. What replaces the plaza is not a like-for-like rebuild. It's a 780,000-square-foot mixed-use project with a name, a mission statement, and a construction loan an order of magnitude larger than the plaza itself was ever worth.
The timeline is worth laying out plainly, because most coverage of this project has focused on renderings rather than sequence:
That last stretch, from April 2026 to late 2027, is roughly twenty months of towers going up in full view of the Harding Pike and White Bridge Road intersection. The blasting made noise for a defined window with a hard end date. The vertical build has no equivalent single day residents can circle on a calendar. It will simply be there, visible, for most of the next two years.
The plans have grown since they were first unveiled. When AJ Capital released early renderings in spring 2025, the residential component, branded 1 Iris Lane and designed by New York firm Meyer Davis, was described as two buildings with roughly 40 units each, about 80 total. By the time the $475 million construction loan from Barings closed in January 2026, the same buildings were being described as two 46-unit towers, 92 condominiums in total, with pricing described as starting around $3 million and units already 40 percent pre-sold. Earlier permit filings had listed a $2.5 million starting price. Either way, this is not a modest infill project. Units average close to 3,200 square feet across one to four bedroom layouts, with amenities that include a saltwater pool, a golf simulator, a piano room, and a private Mahjong room.
Meyer Davis is led by Will Meyer, a Nashville native, which the developer has leaned into as part of the pitch that the design will honor the area's history rather than simply drop a glass tower on it. The name itself is a deliberate callback. In 1931, a group of Belle Meade residents founded the Nashville Iris Association, and their advocacy helped make the iris Tennessee's official state flower in 1933. "1 Iris Lane" is meant to nod to that history, though whether longtime residents read it that way or simply see a new address on an old corner remains to be seen.
The retail portion is larger in scope than most people expect from a project that started as a grocery store replacement. Seven two- and three-story buildings will wrap a central courtyard anchored by an antique carousel, with more than 40 storefronts, a boutique hotel, a members' club, and what the developer describes as world-class restaurants alongside local retailers. Chicago-based Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture is handling overall design, with the Birmingham-based Brasfield & Gorrie serving as construction manager. Sixty percent of the site is planned as green space, including the activation of Richland Creek and a greenway connection to Sylvan Park and McCabe Park, which would give Belle Meade Village a walking link into neighborhoods to the east that it currently doesn't have.
One detail that hasn't drawn much attention: the residential count on this site is bigger than just the 92 condos at 1 Iris Lane. Broader coverage of the project has referenced 388 total residential spaces and 78 hotel rooms across the full development, meaning apartments beyond the for-sale units are also part of the plan. That distinction matters if you're trying to picture density at the intersection once everything opens.
If you shopped at this Kroger for groceries, you've had almost two years to find a new routine. When the closure was announced, the company pointed customers to the Green Hills store at 2131 Abbott Martin Road and the West Nashville location at 5705 Charlotte Pike. There was also talk that Kroger might relocate into a nearby building at 4301 Harding Pike that once housed a Harris Teeter, space the company reportedly still held a lease on as of early 2025. No opening date for that location has surfaced since. As of the most recent reporting on Belle Meade Village's retail lineup, no supermarket tenant has been named among the 40-plus storefronts planned for the site. If a full grocery store returns to this corner, it hasn't been announced yet.
It's easy to treat the end of blasting as the finish line because it was the part of construction you could feel in your chest. But the honest way to think about where this project stands, as of August 2026, is that the ground-shaking phase is over and the sky-changing phase has just started. Crane installation began back in December 2025. Vertical concrete construction is underway now. The residences at 1 Iris Lane aren't expected to be finished until late 2027, and the retail village, hotel, and green space around it aren't expected to wrap until 2028.
That's not a criticism of the project. Developments this size, 15.5 acres, $475 million in financing, nearly 400 residential spaces across for-sale and rental product, don't move fast, and nobody promised they would. But if you've been telling yourself the worst is behind this corner because the explosions stopped, it's worth resetting that expectation. The next twenty months will look less dramatic than the last five, but they'll be visible every single day, not just on the days crews schedule a blast.
Belle Meade has absorbed plenty of change over the decades without losing what makes it Belle Meade. This corner is simply where the next chapter of that is being poured, literally, floor by floor.
If you're trying to understand how a project like this reshapes value, traffic, or timing for a specific address nearby, that's exactly the kind of hyperlocal read Blake Johnson - Redbird Real Estate spends its time on. Request a Complimentary Home Consultation and we'll walk through what Belle Meade Village actually means for your corner of the neighborhood, not just the renderings.
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