On a Saturday morning in early August, the LaVista and Oak Grove Road intersection still behaves like a village corner. A short line forms at the meat counter inside Oak Grove Market, two doors down Kindred is prepping for oyster night, and the parking lot at the old North DeKalb Mall site is quieter than it has been in years. If you have lived here a while, you know the quiet is temporary. Six blocks west, cranes are up. A national outdoor brand just signed a lease. A coffee company from Clarkston is opening in a former gas station on Mistletoe.
This is the guide for people who already live here. The premise is simple: the fall of 2026 is the last season the LaVista corridor will feel like a small commercial pocket before the scale changes. What you do with that window depends on how much you like the corner as it currently stands.
The thesis, briefly
Oak Grove has spent forty years defined by a few blocks of independent operators anchored to Oak Grove Market. The Lulah Hills project on the old mall footprint will introduce roughly 1,700 apartments, 100 townhomes, and 320,000 square feet of retail less than a mile east of that intersection. The interesting question for a resident is not whether that changes daytime traffic on LaVista, which it will. The interesting question is which of the small businesses on the current block get stronger because of the new foot traffic, and which get flattened by it. This fall is when you can still eat and shop at all of them without having to think about that yet.
What actually moved at the mall site this year
The mall came down in 2024. For most of 2025 the site looked like graded dirt. What changed in 2026 is that the project stopped being a rendering and started being buildings. If you drive Lawrenceville Highway on your way to I-285, here is what to look for through the fencing:
- March 4, 2026. EDENS announced the first slate of retail tenants: Anthropologie, Design Within Reach, Herman Miller, Solidcore, Firepit Pizza Tavern, Honeysuckle Gelato, Les Mains Nail Bar, and LaserAway, joining a relocated Publix, the reconfigured AMC, and the existing Marshalls.
- April 7, 2026. Vertical construction began on the first residential building, a six-story, 303-unit apartment community called NOVEL Lulah Hills with 39,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. Empire Homes is building 92 for-sale townhomes on the same parcel.
- July 15, 2026. L.L. Bean signed a 15,000-square-foot lease at the corner of Lulah Avenue and Oak Tree Road. It will be the brand's first Georgia store.
- Ongoing. The AMC lobby, box office, and restrooms are being rebuilt around 11 recliner auditoriums, with the theater staying open through construction. Marshalls stayed open as well.
The first retail deliveries are scheduled for the first quarter of 2027, with the initial apartments landing later that year. In practical terms, that means fall 2026 is the last stretch where you can watch the site from the outside without navigating construction traffic on Lawrenceville Highway.
Refuge Coffee, and why the Mistletoe address matters
The tenant to actually visit this fall is Refuge Coffee's new location in a former fuel station at North Druid Hills Road and Mistletoe Road, just north of the main mall property. Refuge is a Clarkston-based nonprofit coffee operator that trains and employs resettled refugees. The Mistletoe location is the first piece of Lulah Hills you can walk into.
The address matters for a specific reason. It sits between the old mall footprint and the residential streets running north into the Oak Grove elementary district, which means it is the first place the new project touches the existing neighborhood at pedestrian scale. If you want a read on how the finished development will feel on foot, that corner is your preview.
The LaVista block that has to hold the line
Two doors down from Oak Grove Market at 2751 LaVista Road, Kindred was built by the market's owners in April 2022 in the former Kitchen Six space. The chefs literally shop the butcher counter. As co-owner Rick Watson put it in a small business feature, "The heart of our customer base is the neighborhood."
That model — restaurant, butcher shop, and grocery run by the same partners inside a two-hundred-foot stretch of LaVista — is what Oak Grove residents have been quietly protecting for two decades. It is also the model most exposed to what happens a mile east. When 1,700 new households move into Lulah Hills, some percentage of them will drift west for a Tuesday steak dinner. Kindred can absorb that. The question is whether the block-level identity holds when the Publix relocates across the street from Shamrock Plaza into the new development, and when a full L.L. Bean opens at Lulah and Oak Tree.
The corridor's other operators are worth naming for the same reason. The Grove Bar & Grill opened in June 2005 in a converted service station and has been the family option on the block ever since. Napoleon's Grill at 2836 LaVista handles the gastropub end. None of them are new. That is the point.
The corridor, before and after
Here is a compressed view of the LaVista and Lawrenceville Highway corridor as it stands this fall against what is scheduled for Q1 2027 and beyond.
| Element | Fall 2026 | Scheduled 2027 and later |
|---|---|---|
| Grocery anchor | Publix at Shamrock Plaza | Publix relocated into Lulah Hills |
| Retail square footage at mall site | Marshalls, AMC only | Roughly 320,000 sf across new tenants |
| Movie theater | AMC open, mid-renovation | AMC with 11 recliner auditoriums, new lobby |
| Residential on mall site | Zero | 303 apartments plus 92 townhomes in first phase |
| Independent food block | Oak Grove Market, Kindred, The Grove, Napoleon's | Same, plus Firepit Pizza Tavern and Honeysuckle Gelato in the new project |
| Coffee | Local cafes only | Refuge Coffee at Mistletoe open now |
The line worth reading in that table is the residential row. A neighborhood that has been almost entirely single-family for its whole modern history is about to add a six-story apartment building and ninety-two townhomes on a single parcel. Whatever your read on that is, this fall is the window to form it based on the site as it currently exists.
What to do with the next eight weekends
A resident-scale plan for late summer and fall:
- Do a Saturday walk from Oak Grove Market up to the corner of North Druid Hills and Mistletoe. It is the clearest way to feel the scale change between the existing block and the new project.
- Visit Refuge Coffee at the Mistletoe location once before the rest of Lulah Hills opens, so you have a baseline for how the pedestrian environment reads with only one tenant active.
- Book a Tuesday or Wednesday at Kindred rather than a Friday. Watson has described the menu as a "build your adventure" format, and the weeknight version of the room is closer to what neighbors actually get.
- Buy your Thanksgiving meat order from Oak Grove Market by early November. The counter has run holiday sides for four decades, and this is the last holiday season before a full-scale Publix opens a mile east.
- Drive Lawrenceville Highway past the mall site once a month through November. The vertical construction is visible from the road and the change month over month is more noticeable than most residents expect.
A note on what this means for houses on these streets
Long-term Oak Grove and North Decatur owners have been asking a version of the same question all summer: does Lulah Hills change what my house is worth. The honest answer is that a project of this scale, delivered a mile from a stable single-family grid, tends to affect two things first. Walkability scores on the blocks closest to Mistletoe and Lawrenceville Highway will read higher once retail opens. And the pool of buyers who want to be within a short drive of a full mixed-use center will widen. Neither of those is a stat you can quote today. Both are worth watching by the time the first tenants open in Q1 2027.
If you are curious what any of this actually does to your specific block, or you want a numbers-led read on your house before the next phase of the project delivers, Lauren Bowling works these streets and can give you a clear answer. Book a Consultation when you want the conversation to be about your address, not the neighborhood in the abstract.
