Walk Hillsboro Pike toward Abbott Martin this month and you will pass three different job sites before you reach a parking spot. A crane over Crestmoor Road. Fresh signage going up in the Vertis building on Richard Jones Road. Construction fencing wrapped around a section of the mall that has not changed its exterior in longer than most of its shoppers have been alive. The headline everyone in Green Hills has heard by now is that the mall is getting rebuilt. What's easy to miss, standing on that sidewalk, is that almost everything around the mall got there first.
That order matters more than the announcement did.
The Ownership Change Nobody Announced Until It Mattered
The Mall at Green Hills opened in 1955 under the name Green Hills Village. For most of its history it operated under a split arrangement: Simon Property Group held a majority stake, but Taubman Realty Group ran day to day leasing and management. That changed in November 2025, when Simon completed its purchase of the remaining ownership interest in Taubman and, for the first time in the mall's roughly seventy years of operation, took full control of who gets a lease there.
Three months later, on February 4, 2026, Simon announced what that control would be used for: a $250 million investment program spanning three of its properties, including The Mall at Green Hills, Cherry Creek Shopping Center in Denver, and International Plaza in Tampa. For Green Hills specifically, the plan calls for a full exterior overhaul, two story entrances, and a shift toward smaller, higher end boutique spaces rather than the wide format anchor stores the mall was built around. Simon's own leadership described it as applying the same approach used at Southdale Center in Minneapolis, a mall it recently repositioned around luxury and experiential tenants.
That detail is worth sitting with. The plan for Green Hills is not a response to something specific happening in Green Hills. It is a playbook Simon is running at three malls in three different cities at once, and Nashville happened to be one of them. The wave of new names filling the mall's directory is not local demand pulling those brands in. It is a corporate leasing strategy landing here the same way it landed in Denver.
What's Actually Landed So Far
No source has confirmed that exterior construction on Simon's own redevelopment has broken ground yet. The retail turnover has been running well ahead of it.
Already open, as of this month:
- SKIMS, now open on the lower level
- Christian Louboutin, now open on the upper level next to Nordstrom
- World, now open on the lower level near Dillard's
- Journey, relocated to the lower level outside Dillard's
- Altar'd State, relocated into a new space across the hall from its old one
- Coach, opened in May
- Oota Egyptian Eatery, opened in late May
- Vuori, opened in June
- Mountain High Outfitters, opened in July
- Clayton & Crume, which ran as a Father's Day kiosk earlier this summer
Still on the way:
- Swatch, announced but without a confirmed opening date
- Burberry, relocating within the mall this August
- Edikted, arriving in September
- Rowan, arriving this fall
None of this required a single jackhammer. It is a tenant list being rewritten in real time, months ahead of the physical redevelopment it is supposed to accompany. Read the list again and the pattern is not subtle: luxury and national fashion brands, almost no independent local retail. That is exactly what a shift toward smaller, higher end boutique spaces looks like once it starts showing up on lease agreements instead of press releases.
The Restaurant Opening Before The Mall's Construction Does
A few blocks from the mall, Nashville-based Southern Land Company is opening its first ever affiliate owned and operated restaurant. Lupo Notte, an Italian concept designed by Nashville firm Hastings Architecture, is set to open this summer inside Southern Land's Vertis mixed-use building on Richard Jones Road. It is worth noting that Southern Land is not Simon. It is a separate developer, making its own bet on the same six blocks, on its own timeline, with its own money.
That is the second data point for the thesis. The mall's redevelopment is still in the tenant-announcement stage. The building next door already has a restaurant opening.
A New Building Going Up Across The Street
Directly across from the mall, at 2121 Crestmoor Road, a two story office building has been demolished to make way for a luxury mixed-use residential project developed by Material Ventures and Stiles. The building will offer one, two, and three bedroom units ranging from 750 to 2,220 square feet, positioned as the closest new residential development to the mall itself. Construction progress on the site was already visible as of February 2026, months ahead of any confirmed construction start on Simon's own redevelopment.
Put the three projects side by side and a pattern emerges that a simple list of openings would miss.
| Already open, under construction, or on a confirmed 2026 timeline | Announced, not yet confirmed under construction |
|---|---|
| SKIMS, Christian Louboutin, World now open at the mall | Mall's two-story flagship entrances |
| Coach, Vuori, Oota Egyptian Eatery opened this spring and summer | Mall's exterior revitalization and landscaping |
| Lupo Notte opening this summer at Vertis | |
| 2121 Crestmoor under visible construction since February |
The neighborhood around the mall is moving faster than the mall.
What Hasn't Changed
None of this has touched the spots that have anchored Green Hills for years. Green Hills Grille is still serving the same eclectic menu it has for two decades on the same site. Emmy Squared Pizza is still doing Detroit-style pies with the same happy hour Monday through Thursday. The Bluebird Cafe on Hillsboro Pike is still running its songwriters' circle the way it has since long before anyone was talking about jewel-box retail. And on August 14, the Full Moon Pickin' Party returned to the Percy Warner Park Equestrian Center for another night of bluegrass under the full moon, food trucks included, the same tradition it has been for years.
Construction fencing and crane booms are easy to notice. What's actually harder to see, walking past all of it, is how much of daily life in Green Hills has stayed exactly the same while three separate developers make three separate bets on what comes next.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood's changes because you live in it, not because you're shopping for one, that distinction is the whole story. The mall's transformation is still mostly on paper. The restaurant, the residential building, and most of the new store openings are not. Whatever the finished redevelopment looks like when Simon's construction crews actually break ground, the neighborhood around it will have already changed shape twice by then.
If you ever find yourself wondering what any of this means for your own street, your own home's value, or your next move in Middle Tennessee, that's a conversation Parker Brown has every week. Let's connect, start your Nashville search.
