Anyone who shops at the Stratford Hills Target on a Saturday morning knows the drill: turn off Forest Hill Avenue, park somewhere near Publix if you're lucky, and try not to notice the same dark storefront near Cherokee Road that's been sitting there, again, for longer than feels normal. For years the guessing game around this shopping center has been about food. What's replacing the seafood place. Whether the Chipotle rumor is finally real. Whether anything will stick in the building that keeps losing restaurants.
This year the guessing game has an answer, and it isn't the one most people expected. Three tenants are landing at the Shops at Stratford Hills in 2026, and none of them serve dinner. A dental practice is moving into the space that swallowed two restaurant concepts in a row. A children's dance studio is taking over a former Subway. And an urgent care clinic that Bon Secours first announced back in 2023 is, after three years, finally under construction. Put those three together and a different story about this shopping center starts to take shape, one that has less to do with where to eat and more to do with how little you'd need to leave the neighborhood at all.
The Building Two Restaurants Couldn't Keep
The outparcel at 7131 Forest Hill Avenue has a rough track record. The 5,100-square-foot building was occupied for years by an O'Charley's restaurant before the seafood chain Hook & Reel moved in for a short stint, and Hook & Reel was the New York-based chain's only Richmond location. Hook & Reel closed, and the building sat empty long enough that neighbors on local forums started speculating about what might finally take.
The answer, according to a permit filed with the city, is Family Dental. Family Dental is preparing to open a new location at 7131 Forest Hill Ave., in the outparcel building at the Shops at Stratford Hills that was formerly occupied by Hook & Reel. Family Dental is the Virginia arm of Chicago-based Dental Dreams, which was founded in 2001 and has offices in multiple states and under several brand names. This isn't a first foray into Richmond for the company either. Family Dental already has a location at 3904 Hull St. in Richmond.
What's worth sitting with here is that the rest of the center was never struggling. Stratford Hills is anchored by Target and Publix, and other businesses in the center include Five Guys, Truist and Chick-fil-A. Local developer Harper Associates owns much of the property at the center, which the firm developed. Two restaurant concepts failed in the same building while the grocery and fast-casual tenants around them held steady, which suggests the problem was never foot traffic. It was that one particular building never worked as a place to eat.
A Subway Becomes a Dance Studio
A few doors down, a different kind of vacancy is filling in. The upcoming Bella Ballerina has a seven-year lease on the N unit of 7101 Forest Hill Ave., which was formerly a Subway, and the 1,600-square-foot space sits near Anytime Fitness at the Stratford Hills center.
Bella Ballerina offers dance classes that combine ballet, jazz and tap for children ages 18 months to 10 years old, and the Stratford Hills location is planning to open in late August. Enrollment for new students started in late July. Classes cost about $330 for 12-week sessions for younger students and $345 for older kids. The studio isn't a first-time venture for its owner either. The new studio is local franchisee Allie Wine's third location, coming after studios she runs in the Brandermill and Short Pump areas. With her initial schedule of classes, Wine estimated capacity for about 150 students, with room to expand later.
Wine's reasoning for planting a studio in South Richmond rather than another western suburb is worth hearing in her own words. "I live in Church Hill, and a bunch of my friends are parents living in the city, and so I know from my experience there is a huge lack of child-focused businesses within the Richmond city limits," she said. That's a citywide observation more than a Stratford Hills-specific one, but it explains why a dance studio, rather than another sandwich shop, is the thing filling this particular vacancy.
The Clinic That's Taken Three Years
The most telling story at the center, though, is the one still finishing. Back in November 2023, Bon Secours confirmed it had plans for an urgent care clinic here. The health system had plans for a clinic in the Shops at Stratford Hills, in a yet-to-be-built new outparcel at the corner of Forest Hill Avenue and Cherokee Road, where it would share the future building with a planned Chipotle. At the time, a Bon Secours spokeswoman told a reporter the clinic was expected to open the following year.
That didn't happen. Nearly three years later, the Chipotle half of that same building has come and gone from "planned" to open for business. Tenants at the center now include a recently opened Chipotle in the new-construction outparcel at Forest Hill Avenue and Cherokee Road, alongside Goodwill and Five Guys. The urgent care clinic, announced in the same breath as that Chipotle back in 2023, is only now nearing the finish line. Bon Secours is targeting a late 2026 opening date for the clinic, according to a health system spokeswoman, and the project has been in the works for several years, with the building now under construction.
Here's what that gap actually tells a Stratford Hills resident: filling an empty storefront, like Family Dental moving into a former restaurant or Bella Ballerina taking over a Subway, happens in a matter of months once a lease is signed. Building something from the ground up on raw outparcel land, like the Bon Secours clinic, runs on a completely different clock. Same shopping center, same developer's footprint, two very different timelines.
A quick scan of where things stand as of this August:
- Open now: Target, Publix, Five Guys, Chick-fil-A, Truist, Anytime Fitness, Goodwill, and the recently opened Chipotle at Forest Hill and Cherokee
- Opening this month: Bella Ballerina dance studio, former Subway unit
- Permit filed, no confirmed date: Family Dental, former Hook & Reel building
- Under construction, targeting late 2026: Bon Secours urgent care, same corner as the new Chipotle
An Errand Loop, Not a Dining Destination
Line all of this up and the Shops at Stratford Hills starts to look less like a place people drive to for a night out and more like a place where you don't have to drive anywhere else. Groceries, banking, a workout, a haircut for the dog at Goodwill's neighbor if you count the thrift run, a dentist appointment, dance class for the kids, and eventually a same-day clinic visit if someone comes down with something over a weekend. That's a different kind of convenience than a restaurant row, and it's arguably a more durable one. Restaurants at this particular address have a track record of not lasting. Dentists, urgent care clinics, and dance studios tend to sign longer leases and stay put.
None of this touches the part of Stratford Hills that residents actually gather for, which has never been the shopping center anyway. Southampton Recreation Association was founded in 1950 by members of the Southampton Civic Association, originally with just one pool, tennis courts, and a baseball field. When the main pool was completed, it was the first community pool in Chesterfield County. It has grown considerably since. The club now offers four pools, including two 25-meter pools and two baby pools, a 70-foot double-loop water slide, a championship swim team for ages 5 to 18, nine tennis courts with three lighted for evening play, a basketball court, a volleyball pit, and an ice rink for winter activities. Kids who grow up on the club's swim team compete as the Southampton Swordfish, a name generations of Stratford Hills families would recognize before they'd recognize half the businesses at the shopping center.
That split, a shopping center built for errands and a recreation club built for community, is probably the more accurate way to describe how Stratford Hills actually functions day to day. Residents have long joked that the temperature seems to drop ten degrees the moment you turn off Forest Hill Avenue into the tree canopy that gives this neighborhood its tucked-away feel, and four sections of the James River Park System sit within Stratford Hills itself, offering trails, rapids, and access for fishing, tubing, and kayaking. The shopping center handles the logistics. The river, the trails, and the pool club handle everything else.
If you're curious how changes like these tend to ripple through home values or what they might mean if you're thinking about your own next move in Stratford Hills or nearby, Heather Grubb knows this stretch of Forest Hill Avenue well and is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
