For years, the mental map of One Loudoun ended at Atwater. Exchange Street ran a few walkable blocks past Matchbox, Bar Louie, Uncle Julio's, and the Alamo Drafthouse, and then it stopped. Everything north of that line was farmers market gravel, construction fencing, and a promise about what would eventually go there.
That promise arrived this year. The fences came down over the first weekend in April when Arhaus opened, and since then the north side of the center has filled in fast enough that residents who haven't walked it in three months will not recognize the block. The shorthand the developer is quietly using for this new stretch is Uptown, and the label fits. What is coming online is not an extension of the existing downtown so much as a second one, anchored by a plaza that changes function with the season.
The claim worth making
Ashburn's weekend center of gravity is shifting north. The old Exchange Street loop was built around dinner and a movie. The new block is being built around a rink-in-winter, green-in-summer plaza in front of Bartaco, and every tenant that has signed on so far is legible only in that context. If you already live here, the practical consequence is that the walk you have taken a hundred times has quietly grown a second half.
Kite Realty Group broke ground in October 2024 on seven new buildings extending Exchange Street north, adding roughly 86,000 square feet of retail, about 33,000 square feet of office space, a full service business hotel, and around 400 luxury multifamily units. That is the scaffolding. The interesting question is what it is scaffolding for.
What is actually open on the new block right now
As of this month, five things are open on the expansion side that were not open a year ago:
- Arhaus held its grand opening the first weekend of April. The 20,000 square foot store is the anchor of the block, and it is the tenant whose signage went up first.
- Tatte Bakery & Cafe opened on Wednesday, June 10. Crowds turned out that morning for coffee, pastries, tartines, and the outdoor patio, and the patio has stayed busy through the summer.
- Van Leeuwen Ice Cream has its signage up and construction essentially complete. As of the most recent reporting, an official opening date was still pending, but the shop is ready.
- Alo Yoga has opened its activewear store on the block.
- The Arhaus outdoor terrace, roughly 4,000 square feet, functions as its own small patio room off the main store.
Elsewhere at One Loudoun the past nine months delivered a handful of smaller openings worth knowing about, especially if you have not been down that way lately. Drybar opened a blowout salon next to the Alamo Drafthouse at 20605 Easthampton Plaza. CloudFizz, a "dirty soda" shop mixing sodas with flavored syrups and cold foam, moved into the former Firehouse Subs space at 20544 Easthampton Plaza in December. Kendra Scott opened its jewelry and accessories store in December. Neuhaus, the Belgian chocolatier, opened in November, tucked next to Kendra Scott on Exchange Street.
The plaza is the point
Skip the tenant list for a moment and look at the site plan. Bartaco is being built as a freestanding building on a median, roughly 5,200 square feet with seating for about 168 across the dining room, bar, and patio. That is a larger footprint than the Reston Town Center Bartaco, which runs about 4,200 square feet. But the interesting number is not the square footage. It is the fact that the small park directly in front of Bartaco is designed to convert to an ice skating rink in the winter months.
This is a different design instinct than the one that produced the original downtown block. Old One Loudoun optimized for dinner and a movie: fixed rooms, fixed uses, a Friday-night pattern. The Uptown plaza optimizes for a rotating reason to show up. Summer evenings it is a lawn and event space. Restaurant Week and the calendar of Downtown One Loudoun promotions run through it. Come November, the same grass becomes ice.
Bartaco itself is not open yet. Signage went up in July, and the operator confirmed to local press that an opening will land sometime between now and the end of the year. Interior fixturing was the last major stage as of early summer. That timeline matters for residents because it means the plaza's first winter as a rink will coincide with the restaurant's first months of service. The block is being introduced as a package.
What is still behind glass
Enough is confirmed for the new stretch that it is worth keeping a small map in your head of what is still coming. The tenants below are signed and under build-out or in the leasing pipeline:
| Tenant | Category | Status as of summer 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Bartaco | Restaurant, ~5,200 sf | Signage installed, opening by year-end |
| Pottery Barn | Home | Signed, build-out ahead |
| Williams Sonoma | Kitchen and home | Signed, build-out ahead |
| Madewell | Apparel | Signed, build-out ahead |
| Anthropologie | Apparel and home | Slated for a longtime vacant spot next door to the new block |
| Van Leeuwen | Ice cream | Construction complete, opening imminent |
| Business hotel (brand TBD) | Full service | In the plan, unbranded publicly |
The cluster is legible. Pottery Barn, Williams Sonoma, and Arhaus form a home loop. Add Madewell, Alo, and Anthropologie and you have the fashion pass. Tatte and Van Leeuwen carry breakfast and dessert. Bartaco carries the evening. The rink carries the winter.
The rest of the campus did not stand still
If your weekend routine keeps you on the south end of Exchange, a few smaller changes have accumulated that are easy to miss. A new Chase Bank branch has opened in the extended Trader Joe's parking lot. The EatLoco farmers market that ran on the Atwater land now under construction relocated nearby and rebranded as the Ashbrook Farmers Market, so the Sunday morning routine still exists, but the address moved. The summer 2026 programming calendar for Downtown One Loudoun is running Matchbox all-day happy hour from June 4 through August 31 and a Van Leeuwen summer promotion from June 29 through August 31, both of which are the kind of thing you notice only if you check the calendar or walk through on a Thursday.
There has been turnover too, which is the honest part of any active center. Firehouse Subs closed in January 2025, which is how CloudFizz got its storefront. The Meadows Original Frozen Custard closed in December, citing competition from other frozen dessert options on the campus, and that space is still unspoken for as of the last report. In an old center that would read like decline. In a center adding Van Leeuwen and Tatte in the same summer, it reads like a reshuffle.
How the week actually reshapes for a resident
If you live in One Loudoun, Ashburn, or Lansdowne and you already have a rhythm here, the practical shift is small but real. Tatte moves the morning coffee decision. It is now the closest European-style bakery cafe to most of Ashburn, and the patio faces east, which matters in July at 8 a.m. Arhaus moves the furniture browse. If you have been driving to Tysons for that kind of showroom, that trip is now optional. The Van Leeuwen opening and the Bartaco opening, whenever they land, will move the after-dinner walk northward, because the plaza between them will pull foot traffic that used to reverse course at Atwater.
Parking is the one variable that has not entirely caught up. The plan calls for more structured and surface parking as Exchange Street extends, but the busiest weekend evenings this summer already showed the pattern of the original downtown lots filling first while the new block still had capacity two rows away. That is a quiet gift for the first six months if you are willing to walk an extra block.
The larger point for anyone thinking about the neighborhood as a place to live, not just to visit, is that One Loudoun is no longer a single-block town center with houses around it. It is turning into two connected blocks and a plaza, with 400 new luxury apartments coming in above the retail and a business hotel arriving to serve the office tenants next door. That is a different kind of place. Not a bigger version of what was here. A different shape.
If you are thinking about where to land inside that shape, whether that is a townhome on the Ashburn side, a condo close to the plaza, or a Lansdowne single-family home with a short drive in, the team at Eryn Appell knows the streets, the builders, and the blocks well enough to talk through what the next twelve months actually mean for value and daily life. Reach out when you are ready to look at what your home is worth today.
