Walk down Griffith Street this month and you will pass a shopping center that spent two years being gutted, repainted, and rebuilt around a question nobody expected: what do you put in a nearly 40,000-square-foot building in the middle of a college town when the thing that used to anchor it, a grocery store, is exactly what you decide not to bring back.
That is the real story at Sadler Square. Not the restaurant openings, though there are plenty of those. The story is what the property owner chose to leave empty on purpose.
The Building That Used to Be a Grocery Store
Before the renovation, Sadler Square was known for one thing: Healthy Home Market, the grocer that anchored the center for years before Earthfare took over the space and eventually closed. When Piedmont Capital bought the property in February 2024, the assumption among a lot of Davidson residents was that whatever came next would need a grocery tenant to make the math work. Big anchor space, prime location a few blocks off Main Street, easy assumption.
It didn't happen. Jonathan Stewart, a partner at Piedmont Capital, said the company had talked with multiple grocers about the old Earthfare box before concluding there was, in his words, "not a need from a grocer who could occupy the former Earthfare box." That is a striking thing to hear about a nearly 40,000-square-foot commercial building a five-minute walk from downtown. It means the calculation that used to justify a grocery anchor in that spot no longer holds, at least not for the company that owns the real estate.
Axios Charlotte's coverage lays out the mix that filled the void instead: restaurants, a boutique, a wellness studio, and a Novant Health primary care clinic relocating from Cornelius to round out the tenant roster. No grocer. The building got a new facade, new roofline, new parking lot and pylon signage, all completed by around August 2025, and the businesses that moved in tell you something about what this stretch of Davidson wants more of right now. It isn't groceries. It's places to sit down, eat, and get treated.
What Actually Moved In
The lineup at 201 Griffith Street reads less like a strip mall and more like a small food hall that happens to have storefronts. Catawba River Outfitters, an outdoor gear and lifestyle shop, and Ella Blu Boutique, which sells accessories and pre-owned designer bags, opened in October 2025 and reported steady walk-in traffic from people already passing by on foot rather than driving in specifically to shop.
Ilios Crafted Greek followed this summer, and its path to opening is worth knowing if you've been wondering why the signage sat up for months before anything happened. Instagram photos of the storefront went up back in April, with co-owner Stratos Lambos telling reporters at the time that the Davidson community aligned with what the fast-casual Greek chain serves, but without a firm date attached. Three months passed. The restaurant finally held its soft opening and ribbon cutting in mid-July, with the doors officially open to the public at 11 a.m. on July 17. If you've been checking that storefront every few weeks since spring wondering what happened to it, that gap between signage and service is normal. Buildouts take longer than announcements suggest.
Rooster's Wood-Fired Kitchen and Copain Bakery, both from Jim Noble's Noble Food & Pursuits group, are the two biggest remaining pieces. Rooster's, the group's fifth location after Uptown, SouthPark, Ballantyne, and Winston-Salem, is taking a 6,800-square-foot space with a seasonal menu built around wood-fired cooking. Copain is a French-style boulangerie and brasserie, taking 4,100 square feet for what will be the brand's fourth location. Both were targeting a summer 2026 opening when the timeline was first reported, which puts them due any week now if Sadler Square's pattern holds. Given how Ilios actually played out, don't be surprised if summer stretches into early fall before either one is serving full dinner service.
Renoja Wellness, a locally owned recovery and longevity studio offering services like cryotherapy and infrared sauna, and Rise Modern Dentistry rounded out the announced lineup. Both were under construction as of last fall, with openings targeted for fall 2025.
A Block You Can Actually Walk With a Drink
One detail that changes how this corner of town functions day to day: the Town of Davidson's Board of Commissioners voted on January 27, 2026 to expand the Main Street Social District to include Sadler Square, effective March 1. That means the open-container zone that already covers downtown Main Street now stretches to Griffith Street too. Once Rooster's and Copain are serving, someone could pick up a drink at one restaurant and walk it down to another storefront within the district, the same way visitors already do on Main Street outside Kindred or Flat Iron Kitchen. Mayor Rusty Knox described it as an economic development tool more than anything else, a way of making the corridor feel like an extension of downtown rather than a separate strip center you drive to.
The Farm Version of the Same Idea
If Sadler Square answers the question of what replaces a grocery store, Summit Farms is answering a bigger version of the same question a mile or so east. Brian Helfrich, the CEO of Summit Coffee, which opened its original cafe on Main Street in Davidson back in 1998, is building a 62-acre farm village on Shearer Road. Construction on infrastructure, trails, and greenways started in April 2026, with the first phase centered on a 10-acre working farm and three buildings that make up what the project calls the Village.
The mechanism here is worth sitting with. Most small farms lose money because they have to chase wholesale accounts or sell produce at markets to survive. Helfrich's model skips that. The farm grows for a 6,800-square-foot Greenhouse Market that will house a grocery counter, a deli, a wood-fired pizza restaurant, and an ice cream shop, all fed by crops grown a few hundred feet away. "You're existing on what you're able to grow and harvest from the land," Helfrich has said, describing the goal as closer to how small towns in Italy source food than how a typical Charlotte suburb does. A 3,000-square-foot Silly Goose Bakeshop and Summit Coffee's own 7,000-square-foot headquarters and roasting facility round out the first phase.
None of it is open yet. Local coverage has pegged the project's opening for 2027, and residential construction on the accompanying 56-home Preserve section isn't slated to begin until fall 2026. But the shape of the plan tells you the same thing Sadler Square's leasing tells you: Davidson isn't backfilling grocery anchors with more grocery anchors. It's building places where food is grown, cooked, and served in the same square block, and treating that as more valuable than a conventional retail tenant.
What This Means for the Next Year on This Side of Town
If you live near downtown, the practical takeaway is simple. Ilios is open now for a fast, Greek lunch or dinner. Catawba River Outfitters and Ella Blu Boutique have been open since last fall. Rooster's and Copain are close, closer than the calendar might suggest given how Ilios played out, but likely still weeks away from full operation. Renoja and Rise Dentistry were targeting fall 2025, so by now they should be up and running, though it's worth a walk-by to confirm given how the rest of the center's timeline has shifted. And a mile away, the fields at Summit Farms are just starting to take shape, with the actual market and restaurants there more than a year out.
None of that reads like a shopping center bouncing back to what it was. It reads like the corridor deciding what it wants to be instead, one signed lease at a time.
If you're watching how downtown Davidson is changing and wondering what it means for your own plans here, whether that's a home nearby or just understanding where the neighborhood is headed, Juliet Thomas has been tracking this market long enough to read the signals underneath the headlines. Let's connect.
