What's Actually Rising at the Front Door of Circle T Ranch

If you've mentioned "the new restaurants coming to Westlake" at a dinner party this year, there's a good chance you and the person across the table were picturing two different projects. One is the corner at Solana Boulevard, where Terra Lounge went public and the town's spring concert series drew families, retirees, and the office crowd from the towers upstairs. The other is a project most residents haven't actually seen rendered yet: 44 acres at the fork of SH 114 and SH 170, directly across from the Charles Schwab campus, that Hillwood calls Front 44.

They are not the same development, they are not on the same road, and they were not approved for the same reason. Understanding the difference matters if you want to know what's actually changing about a normal Westlake week, and when.

Two Corners, Two Different Origin Stories

Solana and Entrada grew out of master-planned branding. Front 44 grew out of a request. Hillwood's own account of the project traces it back to Charles Schwab executives asking for more dining and lodging within walking distance of their headquarters, a detail the company cited when it decided to put retail and hospitality at the ranch's front entrance rather than folding it into an existing node. The Town of Westlake's planning department has said the same site had been on the drawing board since Schwab first moved its headquarters here, and the concept plan cleared Town Council and the Planning and Zoning Commission in a joint session back in April 2024, well before this year's construction news made it a topic of conversation.

That earlier approval covered 16.38 acres between SH 170, SH 114, and Schwab Way for a first phase of retail and office space, with a hotel penciled in for later. What changed in 2026 is not the concept. It's the pace. Hillwood now says construction starts in the third quarter of this year, with the first wave of retail arriving in 2027.

The land has sat inside Circle T Ranch's 2,500 acres for years. What moved this project from a line on a site plan to dirt work is a very specific kind of demand: thousands of people who already work here and have nowhere close to eat lunch.

What's Confirmed, In Writing

Strip out the speculation and here is what Hillwood and the town have put on the record:

• More than 65,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space
• A 54,000-square-foot Class A office building, potentially anchored by a Schwab wealth management tenant
• A 150-room upscale hotel
• An outdoor plaza of roughly 10,000 square feet at the center of the site
• Active lease conversations covering about half the project, including a steakhouse

Hillwood's Vice President of Retail, Guy Grivas, has said the remaining mix will lean heavily toward food and beverage, with health and wellness concepts filling out the rest.

The Ratio Nobody's Marketing Out Loud

Here's the number that changes how you should picture this place. Grivas has put the split at 70 to 80 percent of the project going to restaurants and bars, with the final 20 to 30 percent reserved for health and wellness tenants. Read the press materials and Front 44 gets described as "a curated mix of retail, dining, and hospitality." Read the actual leasing math and there's barely any retail in the traditional sense at all. This is a restaurant plaza with a hotel and an office building attached to it, not a shopping center that happens to have a few places to eat.

That distinction matters for how you use this corner once it opens. Don't expect a boutique row or a big-box anchor. Expect a concentrated cluster of dining options anchored by a name-brand steakhouse, built around a plaza sized for outdoor seating and foot traffic rather than parking-lot retail.

Why Now: The Employee Math Behind the Bet

Front 44 sits in front of three campuses whose combined headcount explains the urgency better than any marketing copy could. Charles Schwab's Westlake headquarters is built out for roughly 7,000 employees. Fidelity Investments has somewhere between 6,000 and 6,400 employees on its own campus nearby. Deloitte University draws about 75,000 visitors a year for training programs, a number the company has said it expects to grow toward 150,000 as it expands.

That's tens of thousands of people cycling through a corner of Westlake every year with limited options for a sit-down dinner or a hotel room within walking distance. Compare that to what already exists a few minutes away at Solana Business Park, which the town's own economic development materials describe as home to about 44 businesses and roughly 3,600 employees, anchored by the 294-room Marriott DFW Westlake.

Front 44 isn't trying to out-scale Solana's hotel count. It's trying to put dining within a shorter walk of a much larger daytime population that currently has to drive to get lunch or dinner.

The Parking Choice That Tells You What They're Actually Building

One detail in the site plan is easy to skip past but says more than any rendering: the majority of parking on the 44 acres will sit on the exterior of the property rather than in a central garage. Hillwood has framed this as a deliberate move to protect storefront visibility and create a more pedestrian-friendly interior, the same logic behind how the plaza is scaled at roughly 10,000 square feet.

It's a small design choice, but it signals a walkable core rather than a strip-center layout, which lines up with how residents already move around this town. Westlake maintains six named trails, Dove-Davis, Solana, Granada, Glenwyck, Entrada Loop, and Entrada Canal, and nothing currently on the books extends one of them to the Front 44 site. Whether that changes once construction wraps is one more open question worth watching, not a confirmed plan.

What to Actually Watch For This Fall

Three things haven't been announced yet, and they're the ones that will tell you the most: a formal groundbreaking date, the rest of the tenant roster beyond the steakhouse in talks, and how Hillwood plans to manage traffic and access during construction along a stretch of SH 114 that the town cited at roughly 30,000 vehicle trips a day near the Schwab campus when it approved the concept plan back in 2024. If you want to track the dirt-moving progress yourself rather than wait for a press release, the Town of Westlake keeps a public development activity map that flags major construction sites as they move through permitting.

None of this is a promise about what your Thursday nights look like next year. It's a set of numbers you can hold up against whatever gets announced next, so you know whether the news is actually new or just a restatement of what Hillwood already said in February.

The bigger point is this: Westlake has spent years being described as a town with more Fortune 500 badges than dinner reservations. Front 44 is the first project built specifically to answer that complaint from the people who already work here, not to give visitors another reason to detour off the highway. That's a different kind of growth than a master-planned village with a European theme, and it's worth knowing the difference before the steakhouse announcement makes headlines and everyone assumes it's just more of what's already at Solana.

If you're watching how this corner of town is likely to shape home values, showing patterns, or what a property near Schwab Way might be worth once the plaza is finished, that's exactly the kind of read Sherri Murphy and The Ultimate Real Estate Group track for clients across Westlake and the surrounding DFW communities. Let's Connect.