What's Moving Into One Winnetka, and How the Corner of Elm and Lincoln Will Work

The village spent more than a decade of meetings and votes on what should go at the southeast corner of Lincoln Avenue and Elm Street. The final answer is a four-story building with 59 residences on its upper three floors. Below them sit about 20,955 square feet of commercial space facing Elm Street, and as of last fall all of it was leased.

The tenant list and a council vote from this past June show how the corner is meant to work. The most visible piece of public ground on the site will become a restaurant's seasonal dining room. Most of the ground floor will go to businesses people visit by appointment. Taken together, the corner is built to be busiest in the evening.

The Plaza Became a Patio in June

The approved plans for One Winnetka included an outdoor plaza right at the Elm and Lincoln intersection. On June 16, the Winnetka Village Council voted unanimously to approve what it treated as a "minor change": that space will now be a seasonal outdoor dining area for Ballyhoo Hospitality's restaurant. The patio will hold 17 tables and 74 seats, enclosed by planters of native grasses, The Record North Shore reported.

Christopher Canning, the attorney representing Ballyhoo, told trustees that "the dining experience like the one that Ballyhoo offers throughout the North Shore is specifically what your residents want, as evidence by what was in the (Winnetka) caucus survey," according to the same Record article.

The change came with a few trade-offs. The four maple trees planned for that spot won't be planted. Ballyhoo offered to plant four magnolias on private property next to One Winnetka instead. The restaurant group will also give the village $20,000 to buy and install electric vehicle charging stations, plus $5,000 to plant up to five trees elsewhere in Winnetka. Scott Mangum, the village's community development director, named the former post office site as one possible spot for those trees.

The patio follows Winnetka's outdoor dining season, which runs April 1 to November 30. In the off months, most of the planters go into storage and a few stay out all year for looks. For about eight months of the year, the corner will be a place to sit down to dinner. For the other four, it will be a mostly open stretch of pavement with a few planters.

Who Fills the Elm Street Frontage

Six businesses split the ground floor. Murphy Real Estate Services handled the leasing, The Record reported in October 2025.

• Ballyhoo Hospitality's Mediterranean restaurant, the anchor tenant, which will take the most visible corner of the building.
• Fare, a natural-food, fast-casual restaurant. Its website lists locations in the Loop, Old Town, Lakeview, at Lake + LaSalle and in Oak Park.
• Charles Schwab, which leased the second-largest space in the project.
• Solidcore, a fitness studio.
• Winnetka Aesthetic Studio, with Dr. Paul Phelps.
• Duet Preservation Audiology, called DUET Audiology Clinic in the village's more recent approvals.

That makes two places to eat and four businesses that work on bookings, memberships or scheduled visits. The anchor restaurant and Charles Schwab hold the two largest spaces. A clothing store or general retailer, the kind of business that fills a sidewalk on a Saturday afternoon, does not appear on the list.

The Anchor Restaurant Sets the Evening Schedule

Ballyhoo already runs several North Shore restaurants. Sophia Steak is in Wilmette, DeNucci's is in Highland Park, and Pomeroy, a French bistro modeled on Parisian cafes, opened at 844 Spruce St. in Winnetka in 2021. The group also runs Jackman and Co. in Glenview and Pizza By Sal and Buck Russell's in Wilmette. One Winnetka will be the group's second restaurant in the village.

The new restaurant will be its largest local project so far. Ballyhoo has described a Mediterranean menu with live-fire cooking, seafood and dips. The space is reported at 6,700 square feet, with room for 200 diners inside and another 40 outside. The patio approved in June has 74 seats, which suggests the outdoor plan grew after that first estimate.

The hours set the pattern for the whole corner. Under the plans presented in June, the restaurant will open at 4:30 p.m. every day and close at 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. With those hours, the largest dining room on the block and its corner patio will sit empty through lunch and fill from late afternoon into the night.

The building's design has already shifted around this restaurant. In February, trustees approved an agreement on their consent agenda letting the restaurant's door reach slightly into the public right-of-way. The floor plans had changed enough that the Elm Street entrance, first drawn as a recessed doorway, now sits flush with the building front. When fully open, the door extends 6 inches over the sidewalk line, The Record reported.

The name is also in flux. Ballyhoo first announced the restaurant as Arkadia, but at the June 16 meeting Canning said that name could not be used and the group was in the process of choosing a new one.

Daytime Runs on Appointments

Before 4:30 p.m., the ground floor belongs to the other five tenants. Four of them run on bookings. A Charles Schwab office, a Solidcore studio, an aesthetics practice and an audiology clinic all bring people downtown at set times for set reasons. That steady flow of scheduled visits suits a corner with limited parking.

Fare is the only tenant set up for a quick daytime meal. As a fast-casual spot sharing a frontage with a dinner restaurant, it covers the middle of the day, when the anchor kitchen is closed. Its existing locations are spread across the city, from the Loop to Lakeview, and in Oak Park.

Parking is part of the plan. The developers committed to adding 39 public parking spaces at ground level. That's useful for a building where daytime visitors arrive for appointments and evening crowds arrive for dinner. Because the two groups mostly come at different hours, they shouldn't compete for the same spaces much.

The Calendar From Here

Walsh Construction was named general contractor in June 2025 and expected to finish in December 2026. The Record's October 2025 and February 2026 reports gave the same targets: building completion this December, with commercial tenants starting to open in early 2027. Those reports did not give separate opening dates for individual tenants.

Here's what that means for the corner over the next few months:

1. November 30 closes Winnetka's 2026 outdoor dining season. The One Winnetka patio has not opened yet, so its first full season would begin with the April 1 start date in 2027, if the building is finished by then.
2. December 2026 is the last-announced target for finishing construction, along with the delivery of the 59 residences above.
3. Early 2027 is when the first ground-floor tenants are expected to open, one at a time.
4. The former post office site may get up to five new trees paid for by Ballyhoo's $5,000 contribution, and the village has $20,000 from the group for EV chargers. The Record's June report named the post office site as a possibility for the trees, not a final location.

Murphy Real Estate's chairman and CEO, John Murphy, summed up the leasing results in a statement to The Record:

"With all of the retail space now leased, One Winnetka continues to outpace our original assumptions."

When the first spring patio season opens, downtown Winnetka's busiest corner will have 74 outdoor seats and a 200-seat dining room serving from 4:30 p.m., with an office, a studio and two clinics working the hours before.

If you own a home a few blocks from Elm and Lincoln and want to know how a finished One Winnetka might change your street and your home's value, Deb Baker Homes will walk you through it. Request a complimentary home valuation, and we'll put together a clear picture of where your home stands before the new corner opens.