For years the honest answer to "where's dinner tonight" in Westlake has been a windshield answer. Southlake Town Square in one direction, Grapevine Main in another, Roanoke's Oak Street if you wanted a walk after. The 44 acres at the SH-114 and SH-170 fork have sat as pasture the entire time, visible from every commute, promising nothing.
That is the parcel Hillwood is now breaking ground on. It is called Front 44, and the tenant mix is the interesting part. A conventional 65,000 square foot retail pad in North Texas is anchored by a grocer or a soft-goods box. This one is not. Hillwood is planning it as roughly 70 to 80 percent food and beverage, with the remainder in health and wellness, because the demand it was designed to answer is not from households at all. It is from the offices behind it.
The Request That Shaped The Tenant Mix
The plot sits directly north of the Charles Schwab campus, at the front-most 44 acres of the 2,500-acre Circle T Ranch that Ross Perot Jr.'s Hillwood has owned since 1993. Charles Schwab executives specifically asked for additional dining and lodging options close to their campus, a request Hillwood cited in its decision to put retail and hospitality at the ranch entrance. That framing matters, because it inverts the usual suburban retail sequence. Rooftops normally arrive first, retail follows the rooftops, restaurants follow the retail. Front 44 is being built for a workforce that is already here in numbers most Westlake residents underestimate.
Consider the count. Circle T Ranch already houses Charles Schwab at roughly 7,000 employees, Fidelity Investments at roughly 6,000, and Deloitte University at roughly 75,000 annual visitors, expanding to about 150,000. Add the office population inside the Solana Business Park across SH-114, and the lunch-and-dinner catchment inside a two-mile radius is closer in scale to a small downtown than a suburb. Front 44 is the first project on the north side of the highway built to serve it directly.
What's Actually Inside The 44 Acres
The program is public and specific enough to plan around.
| Component | Size | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Retail and restaurants | 65,000+ sq ft | Phase I retail slated for 2027 |
| Upscale hotel | 150 rooms | Included in first phase |
| Class-A office building | 54,000 sq ft | Positioned as Schwab wealth-management space |
| Outdoor plaza | ~10,000 sq ft | Anchors the restaurant cluster |
The published plan calls for more than 65,000 square feet of retail, a 150-room upscale hotel, a 54,000 square foot Class-A office building, and a signature restaurant collection situated on a 10,000 square foot outdoor park area. The office component has a named prospective anchor. The 54,000-square-foot building could be a Schwab wealth-management office adjacent to its headquarters campus, with Dallas-based GFF as the design firm.
One design choice is worth watching if you drive past every day. The majority of the parking on the 44 acres will be on the exterior of the plot to allow for a more pedestrian-friendly interior. That is the opposite of the strip-and-sea-of-parking template most of SH-114 was built under in the 1990s. The visual read from the highway will be a wall of trees, low buildings, and a hotel, with the cars pushed to the edges.
The Groundbreaking And The Two-Year Windshield
Guy Grivas, Hillwood's Vice President of Retail, is running the tenant conversations. He said the company is in active conversations with potential tenants for about half of the project, including a steakhouse, and that 70 to 80 percent of the rest will be food and beverage with the final 20 to 30 percent in health and wellness. Half the leasing is spoken for before a shovel moves.
The construction calendar is compact. Hillwood estimates construction will start in the third quarter and be completed in 2027. For a resident who takes the SH-170 exit off SH-114 daily, that means fencing and grading visible this fall, vertical steel on the hotel and office through 2027, and Phase I restaurants opening as the pad sites finish. It is not a ten-year masterplan. It is an eighteen-month change to your commute view.
How It Rewrites The Weeknight Radius
To understand what Front 44 shifts, it helps to be honest about the current Westlake weeknight map. Terra Lounge, at the back of The Terraces at 1500 Solana Blvd, is the closest thing to a neighborhood bar in the town limits, and it was only opened to the public in 2024. Terra Lounge is weekdays only, Monday through Thursday from noon to 8 pm and Friday noon to 5 pm, and the bar is closed on weekends. The Entrada corner offers a Starbucks and construction fencing. The Marriott DFW Westlake inside Solana Business Park has 294 rooms and 15,000 square feet of conference space, but reads as a business hotel rather than a walk-in destination.
Kristi Layton, Glenstar's general manager for The Terraces, has framed Terra Lounge's ambition as becoming the "Cheers" of a town that has very few restaurants.
That candor is the baseline Front 44 is being built against. A 150-room upscale hotel with a signature restaurant collection and a plaza sized for outdoor dining does something the current inventory cannot. It gives a Westlake resident a place to send visiting in-laws that does not require crossing into Southlake or Grapevine, and it gives Schwab and Fidelity a walk-across-the-street option for client dinners that currently default to Dallas or downtown Fort Worth. The steakhouse in Grivas's active conversations is the tell. A steakhouse this close to Schwab and Deloitte University is a client-dinner venue first, a resident amenity second, which is why it will likely be reservable at 6 pm on a Tuesday when the Southlake competition is not.
The Piece That Is Not Yet Public
The tenant list is the part every resident wants and the part that is deliberately not out. Grivas has confirmed a steakhouse in conversation and named the food-and-beverage share; the individual operators have not been announced. That leaves a fair amount of reading between the lines. The 10,000 square foot outdoor plaza suggests a family of smaller restaurants rather than one anchor. The health-and-wellness slice, at roughly 13,000 to 20,000 square feet, is enough for a fitness concept plus one or two medical-adjacent tenants, not a full grocery. The 150-room hotel size sits in the range typical of an autograph or lifestyle flag rather than a full-service convention property, which fits the pedestrian-plaza layout better than a ballroom-driven brand would.
For a Westlake homeowner, the practical read is this. The first thing to arrive will be the hotel and office skeletons, visible from SH-114 through 2027. The pad-site restaurants will open in a wave rather than one at a time, and the steakhouse is likely to be the first named. If you have been keeping a mental list of dinners you drive to Southlake or Grapevine for, the shortest edit to that list happens in 2027, not 2028.
The Corporate Math Underneath, In One Sentence
The reason Front 44 pencils where earlier retail proposals on this parcel did not is that the daytime population inside a two-mile ring finally justifies restaurant-driven rents on its own, before a single household is counted. Circle T Ranch will break ground this year on a new mixed-use project between the Charles Schwab offices and the fork of Texas 170 and Texas 114, and Front 44 is the front-most 44 acres facing the highways, on track for completion in 2027. That is a change in the underlying economics of the corner, not a change in marketing.
For families weighing what long-term ownership in Westlake looks like, Front 44 is the concrete answer to a question that has been abstract for a decade. The town's one-square-mile of retail is about to double in walk-in inventory, and it is happening on a parcel most residents pass twice a day.
If you would like a discreet read on how the SH-114 corridor is repricing estate homes as Front 44 moves from grading to vertical, Andrea Miranda at Briggs Freeman Sotheby's International Realty offers private-market briefings for Westlake homeowners and incoming executives. Get Exclusive Access.
