If you've walked past the fenced block at Elm and Lincoln lately and wondered whether this is finally the season it opens, the honest answer is no. Not this fall. The four-story building rising there is on track to finish construction in December 2026, and the retail spaces inside it won't welcome a single customer until early 2027. That gap between "done" and "open for business" is easy to miss if you're only half paying attention to the cranes.
It matters because it changes where you should actually be looking for what's new in Winnetka right now. The answer isn't the block everyone's watching. It's the places that finished their own renovations quietly, while the big one was still years from a ribbon cutting.
The Timeline Nobody's Double-Checking
One Winnetka has been the subject of village meetings for the better part of a decade, through a failed 2020 sale, a foreclosure, and a scaled-down redesign before Murphy Development Group and Harrison Street's Christopher Merrill finally closed construction financing and broke ground. When the village council gave final approval, then-Village President Chris Rintz told the developers to "go build something, OK?" It read as relief as much as encouragement, and it's a fair summary of how long the corner sat as six empty storefronts.
Construction is now underway with general contractor Walsh Construction, and the project is targeting a December 2026 finish for the building itself. Two of the commercial tenants confirmed for that ground floor are a Mediterranean concept from Ballyhoo Hospitality, the group also behind Winnetka's own Pomeroy, and Charles Schwab, which has leased the project's second-largest footprint. That means the building can be structurally complete and still sit dark for months while buildouts happen. If you're planning a fall or winter routine around a new coffee shop or restaurant opening at that corner, you're planning around a date that hasn't arrived yet.
What's Already Serving Dinner
While that block stayed fenced, the actual dining news of the year happened four blocks over. Avli, the Greek restaurant that's anchored downtown Winnetka for more than 16 years, just finished a 2,400-square-foot expansion into the neighboring Laundry building, adding a roughly 1,600-square-foot lounge and pushing another 800 feet into front-room dining. Chef Jorge Angulo, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, redesigned the menu around mezedes, the Greek answer to shared small plates, while keeping most of the dishes longtime regulars would recognize. Angulo has described the goal as extending Avli's city-caliber dining experience onto the North Shore, and the renovation is the clearest evidence that "new" in downtown Winnetka this year has mostly happened at the edges of the map, not its center.
The other constant through all of this is The Book Stall, which Publishers Weekly has named the top independent bookstore in the country. It didn't need a renovation or a reopening to stay relevant. It just kept doing what it does while the corner two blocks away spent a decade in litigation and redesign. That contrast is worth sitting with: the businesses residents actually rely on this fall are the ones that never waited on a developer's timeline.
The Calendar's Own Countdown
Fall in Winnetka isn't really about new openings. It's about a handful of seasonal fixtures reaching their last date of the year, all clustered into a six-week window.
| What's wrapping up | Last date this season |
|---|---|
| Winnetka-Northfield-Glencoe Chamber Farmers' Market (Elm Street lot) | Saturdays through October 31 |
| First Friday Art Walk, closing the Hubbard Woods season | October 2 |
| Schmidt-Burnham Log House, open to the public | Through November 20 |
None of these dates depend on One Winnetka. They're the same closing schedule the village has run for years, and they're worth putting on a calendar precisely because none of them will repeat until next spring or summer.
The Handoff at the Paddle Hut
As the market winds down, something else picks up. The Winnetka Park District's Platform Tennis & Paddle Hut is one of the only public facilities of its kind in the Midwest, and platform tennis is a genuinely cold-weather sport, played outdoors through fall and into winter on heated courts. It's an easy amenity to overlook in July, when the farmers market and the beaches are getting all the attention, but it's the thing that actually defines a Winnetka Saturday once the market tables come down. Six courts, a season that's just getting started as everything else closes, and almost no marketing beyond word of mouth. That's a fairly accurate description of how the neighborhood tends to operate.
Six Names on a Storefront That Isn't Open Yet
It's worth being specific about what is and isn't coming to that Elm and Lincoln block, because the tenant roster tells you more about 2027 than 2026. Beyond Ballyhoo and Charles Schwab, the building's commercial space is expected to include the fast-casual concept Fare, the fitness studio Solidcore, Winnetka Aesthetic Studio, and Duet Preservation Audiology filling out the rest of the ground floor.
None of that changes what this particular fall looks like. The building will likely be topped out and enclosed by the time the Log House closes for the season on November 20, but the lights won't be on inside those storefronts until well into next year. If you're the kind of resident who's been checking that corner every week since the fencing went up, the more useful habit this season is checking Avli's reservation book or the Park District's paddle schedule instead. Those are already running.
Why the Gap Is the Actual Story
The interesting thing about downtown Winnetka this year isn't the redevelopment everyone's watching. It's how much the neighborhood kept functioning without it. A restaurant that's operated for 16 years found room to grow two blocks away. A bookstore that's been quietly excellent for years didn't need a groundbreaking to prove it. A public paddle facility most towns don't have at all just started its busiest months. The corner that gets photographed the most is, for now, the one place downtown where nothing is actually happening yet.
That's a pattern worth remembering the next time someone tells you a neighborhood's future depends entirely on one project. Winnetka's has always depended on more than that, and this fall is a reasonably clear demonstration of it.
If you're weighing what a changing downtown means for a home you already own here, or you're curious how projects like One Winnetka tend to affect nearby property values once they're finished rather than while they're fenced, the team at The AVE Group has been tracking Winnetka's redevelopment closely. Schedule a free consultation and we'll walk through what the next year here is likely to look like, corner by corner.
