Walk past the Mall at Green Hills on Hillsboro Pike and you're looking at a building that opened in 1955, back when it was called Green Hills Village and the pitch to Nashville was a 25-store strip center. Keep walking a few blocks and you're standing in front of a from-scratch bakery that picked this exact corner for its first Tennessee store and a burger joint that chose this neighborhood over two other Nashville locations it already had running. Keep walking further and you'll find a permit on file for a Swiss running brand's first Nashville store, no opening date attached yet. The mall itself just got a $250 million reason to stop looking like 1955.
That's the actual story here, not a list of openings. Green Hills has spent the better part of two years being the neighborhood where national brands debut, while the building anchoring the whole commercial strip stayed under a slow-moving ownership structure that only recently sorted itself out enough to invest.
The neighborhood already proved itself
Start with what's open right now, because none of this is speculative.
SusieCakes, a scratch bakery with locations on the West Coast and in Texas, opened its first Tennessee store on Green Hills Village Drive in February 2024. Not East Nashville. Not the Gulch. Green Hills.
Jack Brown's Beer and Burger Joint already ran two other Nashville locations before it opened a third in Green Hills on July 28, 2025. An operator with two working locations and real data on where its customers were coming from picked this neighborhood for its next one.
Neither of those is even the neighborhood's longest-running proof point. Char, a Southern-style steakhouse inside The Vertis development, has been serving USDA Prime cuts and running a Sunday jazz brunch with a live trio since 2018. And chef Deb Paquette's etc., tucked behind the mall in the Atlas Building on Bedford Avenue, has been turning out her globally inspired menus since August 2016. Paquette, the first woman in Tennessee to qualify as a certified executive chef, built her reputation at Zola before opening etch downtown and then etc. as its smaller, more intimate sibling here. A restaurant surviving a decade in a neighborhood that keeps attracting new openings around it is its own kind of evidence. The fundamentals were working long before anyone was writing about Green Hills as a launch market.
What's filed but not open yet
Here's where it gets more interesting, because two of the newest names attached to Green Hills haven't actually opened their doors.
On, the Swiss running shoe brand, is preparing to bring its first Nashville store to 4021 Hillsboro Pike, in the space that used to house Whole Foods' Whole Body storefront. A Metro permit reviewed by the Nashville Business Journal shows global architecture firm Gensler leading the design. No opening date has been set. What makes the choice notable isn't just that it's On's first Nashville location, it's that the company's own reporting frames Green Hills as its first retail expansion anywhere in the Southeastern United States, ahead of Atlanta, Miami, or Charlotte.
A few blocks away on Green Hills Village Drive, a new co-branded concept combining Bed Bath & Beyond with The Container Store is heading to 2121 Green Hills Village Drive. It's one of 22 locations picked nationwide for the format's first rollout. Like the On store, there's no confirmed opening timeline yet.
Both of these are worth tracking precisely because they show the gap between a brand deciding on a neighborhood and a storefront actually opening. That gap is the same one the mall itself just closed.
The building everyone's been waiting on
Here's the part that explains the timing. Simon Property Group hadn't been a stranger to the Mall at Green Hills. It had held a majority stake in Taubman Realty Group, the mall's operator, since acquiring roughly 80 percent of the company back in December 2020. What changed in November 2025 was Simon completing the buyout of the remaining stake it didn't already own, which is when it finally took full management and leasing control of the property.
Three months later, in February 2026, Simon announced an investment program of more than $250 million spread across three of its malls: the Mall at Green Hills, Cherry Creek Shopping Center in Denver, and International Plaza in Tampa. For Green Hills specifically, the plan includes a full exterior renovation with two-story entrances, new space built for luxury boutiques, and interior upgrades throughout the roughly one-million-square-foot property. Construction is expected to begin sometime in 2026, with tenant announcements still to come.
Eli Simon, the company's chief operating officer, has pointed to Simon's recently completed overhaul of Southdale Center in Minneapolis, the country's first enclosed mall, as the model for what this kind of redevelopment looks like when a legacy property needs to catch up to the market around it.
That's the mechanism worth understanding if you live nearby. The mall wasn't ignored because nobody wanted to invest in Green Hills. It sat under a shared ownership arrangement for five years before one company had full control and a reason to act. The brands filing permits down the street didn't wait for that resolution. The building did.
What to actually watch from here
If you already live in Green Hills, none of this changes anything about your street tomorrow. What it does is give you three specific things worth tracking instead of a vague sense that "things are changing."
First, whether On's store or the Bed Bath & Beyond and Container Store concept gets a confirmed opening date this year. Second, whether Simon's construction at the mall actually breaks ground in 2026 as announced, or slides the way large redevelopment timelines often do. Third, which tenants Simon names once leasing announcements start, since none have been confirmed publicly as of this writing.
In the meantime, the neighborhood doesn't need any of that to finish playing out. SusieCakes has been open for two and a half years. Jack Brown's has been serving Wagyu burgers here for over a year. Char is still packing its Sunday brunch. And etc. is still doing what it's done since 2016, quietly proving that a good restaurant doesn't need a redevelopment announcement to matter.
If you're curious how a $250 million mall renovation and a wave of first-to-market retail leases tend to move buyer interest in specific pockets of Green Hills, Anna Rose Marangelli tracks these shifts as part of her day-to-day work in the neighborhood. Reach out to schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
