Forest Hill Avenue's Old Storefronts Are Turning Over at Three Different Speeds

Lucky AF: Asian Fusion & Sushi is scheduled to open inside The Evelyn at 4701 Forest Hill Ave. on Oct. 13, according to the restaurant's own location page. About a quarter mile west, the old Westover Place strip center is gone, and framing for its replacement has only just started. Between those two sites sits a former Family Dollar with a signed gym lease and a "coming soon" sign that has outlasted its summer target.

All three are in the same few blocks around Westover Hills Boulevard, and they are moving at very different speeds. The business doesn't set the pace. The building does. A finished new shell fills in months. An old building being gutted takes more than a year. A torn-down lot has taken five years and counting. Once you know which kind of building sits at each address, the next year on this stretch of Forest Hill Avenue gets much easier to read.

Four addresses, four timelines

The Hill Standard building across the street at 4910 to 4930 Forest Hill Ave. shows where this cycle ends up. Developers Charles Bice and Birck Turnbull built it around The Veil Brewing Co. as reported by Richmond BizSense in 2020. It now houses Blanchard's Coffee, the Study Hall soft-serve walk-up in Suite D, and Noex South, which took over the former Boho Quad gym and soft-launched on May 1, 2026. Hill Standard has reached the stage where tenants change and the building stays put. The Noex handoff happened inside a gym space that was already built out.

The Evelyn fills fastest because the hard part is done

The Evelyn started as one of two Forest Hill Avenue demolitions that BizSense covered in December 2023. Dodson Development Group and Evolve Development planned roughly 40 apartments and about 8,000 square feet of commercial space on the former Bank of America lot. Janet's Café & Bakery opened there on Aug. 13, 2025, according to Richmond Magazine.

Lucky AF shows how quickly a new storefront moves once the shell is finished. On Aug. 29, WhatNow reported that the restaurant had posted construction updates with no opening date set. Six weeks later, its own page lists Oct. 13. The restaurant comes from the EAT Restaurant Partners group and already has locations in Short Pump and Scott's Addition. Its preview post mentions Lucky Cats watching over the sushi bar, a locally designed Dragon and Phoenix neon sign, and Chef Hai's sushi and Asian fusion menu.

The posted hours are 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Happy hour runs 2:30 to 6 p.m. on weekdays. Opening dates for new restaurants often shift by a few days, so it's worth checking the restaurant's Instagram before you plan a dinner around the 13th.

Inside older buildings, the walls set the pace

Väsen's taproom at 5047 Forest Hill Ave. sits in a 5,900-square-foot building that held Cafe Zata and then Westover Station. The Scott's Addition brewery finalized its lease in 2024 and opened in December 2025. Co-owner Joey Darragh told Richmond BizSense that the project took "over a year of planning, construction and finding all kinds of fun surprises with the building," and that "we had to earn every aspect of the build."

"We'll be doing small, limited releases of those beers just for Forest Hill." Joey Darragh, Väsen Brewing Co., to Richmond BizSense

Behind the bar are 19 beer taps, four draft cocktail taps and one wine tap. Some beer is moved from Scott's Addition to finish fermenting on site, and that is where the Forest Hill-only releases come from. Kobop shares the space. Jason Song previously ran it as a food truck, and the menu covers Korean barbecue, fried chicken, bao buns and tacos. Väsen's locations page lists hours of 3 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, noon to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and noon to 9 p.m. Sunday. The taproom is closed Mondays, and Kobop's kitchen closes an hour before the bar. In December, the owners said they planned to add a patio and bike racks in the spring.

The former Family Dollar at 1202 Westover Hills Blvd. is going through the same kind of renovation. Fultz & Singh Architects, the firm behind the Väsen taproom, is designing it. Turnbull and Bice, the same pair behind Hill Standard, bought the building in 2018 while the store was still operating. Family Dollar closed in 2025, and interior work was underway by March 2026, with Corinthian Construction as general contractor.

In March, BizSense reported that Burn Boot Camp had leased about 5,000 square feet for its eighth location in the region and hoped to open in summer. The franchise offers 45-minute strength and cardio classes with free childcare during sessions. As of early October, Burn's Richmond Southside page still lists Suite D as "coming soon." That doesn't mean anything is wrong. It is the same pattern Väsen went through, where an older building takes longer to retrofit than the first estimate suggests. A second tenant, offering physical therapy and Pilates classes, has signed for about 6,500 square feet but had not been named publicly as of that March report.

5069 Forest Hill Ave. shows how long a full rebuild takes

The Westover Place strip once held Stories Comics and Act I Hair Design. Blackwood Development Co. and Dumbarton Properties proposed replacing it in 2021, bought the 0.7-acre lot that year for $450,000, and razed the 1980s building in 2023. The lot then sat empty until this summer.

Interest rates explain most of that gap. Dumbarton's Michael Plotkin told BizSense that rates were "3%-and-change" when the partners bought the property. Within about six months they had city approval of their plan of development, and in that same stretch rates "basically doubled." The developers decided to proceed once rates and construction costs settled in 2026. KBS Inc. is the general contractor, WPA Studios is the architect, and Blue Ridge Bank is the lender.

The plan calls for three stories, with 30 market-rate one-bedroom apartments above 7,500 square feet of ground-floor commercial space split into suites of 1,000 to 4,000 square feet. In late July, the developers estimated completion "in about a year." From purchase to move-in, that comes to about six years for one 0.7-acre lot.

Where the next restaurant could go

Put the four sites side by side and the next round of local dining has two possible homes on this stretch, and both are still open.

1. The roughly 4,000-square-foot corner at 1202 Westover Hills Blvd. In March, Turnbull said this space could work as a restaurant with an outdoor patio. No restaurant lease had been announced.
2. The ground-floor suites at 5069 Forest Hill Ave. Morgan Blackwood Patel of Blackwood Development said the team would start marketing them once walls go up and hopes "to attract local food and beverage and service businesses."

Both spaces follow the same timelines as the rest of the corridor. Whoever takes the Westover Hills Boulevard corner will be fitting out an older building that is already partway through renovation, which has been the slower path here. A tenant at 5069 can't open until the building itself is finished. Blackwood Patel described where she expects the corridor to be by then: "When our project delivers, this corridor will have really come into its own compared to before Little Nickel (restaurant) opened or The Veil rezoning began less than a decade ago."

There is also roadwork to plan around. A water-main replacement on Forest Hill Avenue between Hathaway Road and Chippenham Parkway began July 20 and cut westbound traffic to one lane in the work zone. Axios Richmond reported in August that the work was expected to wrap up in October.

Heather Grubb's background in renovation and new construction makes these timelines familiar, from gutting an older building to building on an empty lot. If you're watching what goes into the old Westover Place site or the Family Dollar corner and wondering what it means for your own street, Heather Grubb is glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.