Drive past the parking lot next to the Regal theater and Panera Bread on Kingstowne Village Parkway this summer and you'll see silt fence, survey stakes, and the kind of quiet that precedes a construction crew. The easy guess is another restaurant. Kingstowne has absorbed a lot of them lately, and the empty asphalt has sat there so long that a new tenant feels overdue.
That guess is wrong, and the reason it's wrong tells you more about how this town center actually works than any list of restaurant openings could.
The fence is for 646 homes, not a new storefront
On May 5, 2026, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Halle Companies' plan to convert that surface parking lot into two residential buildings totaling 646 units, right in the core of Kingstowne Towne Center. The project will rise in two phases: a 328-unit building at 5941 Kingstowne Village Parkway first, followed by an adjacent 318-unit building. Each structure will top out around 150 feet and include an indoor pool and an outdoor pool, all served by an eight-level parking garage accessible from Kingstowne Village Parkway.
Supervisor Walter Alcorn, who sat on the county Planning Commission back in 2008 when this same parcel was first zoned for office towers, put it plainly at the meeting: this has come a long way, and it's good to see something actually happening with the property. He wasn't exaggerating. The land has cycled through office plans, then mixed-use plans, then more mixed-use plans, for nearly two decades before this version finally cleared the board.
If you live nearby, this is the headline. Not a new lunch spot. New neighbors, arriving on top of your existing parking lot.
Why the retail got dropped, in the planner's own words
Here's the part that surprised even the county's own reviewers. Halle's original 2020 approval required ground-floor retail in both buildings. The 2026 version drops that requirement entirely, and the reasoning is worth sitting with if you've ever wondered why Kingstowne keeps adding apartments but not storefronts.
DLA Piper land-use planner Kelly Posusney told the Planning Commission in March that there's already so much retail in Kingstowne Towne Center that competing with Federal Realty, the center's owner, for a modest slice of new retail space simply wasn't working. That's not a marketing line. It's a math problem. Kingstowne Towne Center already carries more than 1.6 million square feet of retail and office space, anchored by Giant and Safeway, and the center's centerpiece building at 5900 Kingstowne Village Parkway has stayed nearly 100 percent leased for the past decade. Federal Realty and its predecessor didn't have a vacancy problem to solve. They had a saturation problem, and adding a few thousand square feet of ground-floor shops into an already-full market risked sitting empty rather than filling a need.
That single fact reframes everything else happening here. Kingstowne isn't retail-starved. It's housing-starved, at least in its own core, where despite roughly 5,200 surrounding homes, there has never been a residential building inside the town center itself. This project is the first attempt to put people, not just parking spaces, inside the retail node.
The office market is telling the same story from a different angle. A separate application from developer BXP, still under county staff review, would convert an existing office building within Kingstowne Towne Center into multifamily housing. Two unrelated developers, on two separate parcels, are reaching the same conclusion: office and additional retail don't pencil here anymore, but housing does.
What you get instead of new shops: a plaza built for hanging out
The trade for losing ground-floor retail is a redesigned pedestrian plaza sitting between the Regal theater and Panera Bread, the same stretch of pavement where families already cut through on their way to a movie or a bagel. The approved concept includes a central turf lawn, a promenade, a fountain feature, a tree grove with movable tables and chairs, an informal stage, garden areas, and two outdoor dining areas.
An earlier version of the plan included an ice rink. That got dropped too, for the same reason as the retail: the application materials describe it as no longer considered viable, a leftover idea from an older iteration of the project that didn't survive contact with current market conditions. What survived is simpler and, arguably, more useful for daily life: a lawn to sit on, shade to stand under, and a stage for the kind of small community event that doesn't need a formal venue.
The developer worked with Franconia District Supervisor Rodney Lusk's office and the Kingstowne Residential Owners Corporation on the plaza redesign, which is a detail that matters if you've ever wanted a say in how this space evolves. The residents' own association had a seat at that table.
What actually opened, and what's still an empty storefront
None of this means Kingstowne's food scene has been standing still. California Fish Grill opened its Kingstowne location on January 12, 2026, at 17003A Manchester Boulevard, following a ribbon-cutting. It's the fast-casual seafood chain's third East Coast location after Fairfax and Rockville, and the menu leans into the kind of high-protein, lighter fare that's become a lunchtime staple for anyone tracking macros or just tired of another burrito bowl.
The bigger swap, at least by square footage, is still in progress. Romano's Macaroni Grill closed its Kingstowne location back in January 2024, leaving a 10,596-square-foot space at 5925 Kingstowne Towne Center empty for the better part of two years. Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar signed the lease to fill it, with plans for a 1,379-square-foot patio seating 62 and interior seating for 186 more. As of the most recent reporting, the company hadn't announced a firm opening date, saying only that it's working through remaining approvals with the county.
Notice what these two additions have in common. Neither one is new retail square footage. California Fish Grill and Lazy Dog are both filling spaces that already existed, one that had just opened and one that had sat vacant. That's consistent with everything else happening here. The center isn't growing its retail footprint. It's re-tenanting what it already has, while the actual growth, in square footage and in population, is happening one parcel over, in housing.
What this means for your next couple of years here
If you live in Kingstowne, the practical takeaway isn't which new restaurant to try this month, though California Fish Grill is a reasonable answer if you haven't been yet. It's what to expect from the physical space around you over the next two to three years.
Expect construction activity and some shifted parking near the Regal theater and Panera as the first residential building, the 328-unit structure, moves through site work before its 318-unit neighbor follows. Expect the plaza you currently cut through to eventually look different, with a lawn and fountain replacing what's now a stretch of concrete. Expect roughly 646 new households moving in over that same window, a meaningful share of them in units set aside as affordable under the county's approval, with for-sale units restricted to buyers earning up to 100 percent of area median income and rental units set for renters earning between 60 and 80 percent of that figure. Fairfax County calculated that median at $163,900 for a household of four in 2025, which gives you a sense of who's likely to end up as your new neighbor.
What you shouldn't expect, at least not from this project, is a wave of new shops to browse. The retail here has already found its ceiling. The next chapter of Kingstowne Towne Center is about people living inside it, not new places to spend an afternoon shopping.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values, resale timing, or whether now is the moment to buy or sell near a town center in transition, that's a more detailed conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks this market closely.
Rachel Knapp keeps an eye on exactly this kind of local change across Kingstowne and the rest of the DMV. If you want to talk through what a project like this means for your own plans, Let's Connect.
