The first family got in line at 6 a.m. on July 24, three hours before the doors even opened, for a Lego store. They stood under umbrellas as the rain picked up and the line grew from the covered walkway to the sidewalk to the parking lot, all to be first through the door of the new Lego Store at Town Center Crossing. It is the third Lego store in the Kansas City metro if you count Legoland, and it took over a space Tuft & Needle used to occupy, a few doors down from Tecovas.
Walk two hundred yards from that line and you would have passed two empty buildings that, between them, fed Leawood dinners for six decades. Houlihan's closed on March 27 after roughly thirty years on the south side of the plaza. Hereford House, on the north side, has sat empty since August 2024. Both are being rebuilt right now, and the story of what replaces them says more about where Town Center is headed than any single new storefront does.
What used to fill those buildings
Hereford House opened at Town Center Plaza in 1996 and ran for nearly three decades before it closed under financial strain tied to lawsuits after an employee was found deliberately contaminating food. That employee, Jace Hanson, was later sentenced to 11 years on multiple charges. It is not a pleasant footnote, but it explains why a 12,228-square-foot steakhouse building sat dark for a year and a half while other corners of the plaza filled in.
Houlihan's had a longer, quieter exit. The chain has been shrinking across Johnson County for years. Two other locations, in Fairway and Olathe, closed back in 2019 after the ownership at the time filed for bankruptcy. When the Leawood location closed in March, the company said it was working to place staff at its remaining Overland Park and Lee's Summit locations. The building on 119th Street, wedged between Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn, had been there since at least the mid-1990s.
Both closures left holes in a shopping center that has otherwise been adding tenants all year. What happened next is the more interesting part.
The eight-figure bet behind the empty lot
The Houlihan's site is being demolished and rebuilt as two one-story buildings, a 10,217-square-foot structure and a 6,484-square-foot structure, for a total of four new restaurants. The developer, Drake Development, priced the project at $18 million. In April, the Leawood City Council voted 6-2 to create a Community Improvement District covering just those two buildings, which adds a 1% sales tax on top of what diners already pay. The extra tax is capped at $4.3 million over 22 years and is expected to cover about 23% of the total build cost.
That is a specific kind of bet. The city is not subsidizing the project directly. It is letting future customers finance roughly a quarter of it, dollar by dollar, every time they order dinner. A councilmember pointed out during the vote that the people paying that extra cent on the dollar will not just be Leawood residents, since the plaza pulls from across the metro. The developer has already locked in three of the four tenants, though names had not been made public as of the April vote. Councilmember Mussman described the largest space, roughly 6,500 square feet in the western building, as an upscale sit-down "American bistro" with existing locations in Scottsdale, Del Mar, and Orange County. He said an announcement could come within 30 to 90 days of that vote, putting a likely window sometime this summer, though the operators still hadn't been publicly confirmed as of this writing.
Across the parking lot, the Hereford House building is taking a gentler path. Instead of demolition, it is becoming a second location of Brooksider Sportsbar & Grill, the longstanding Brookside bar bringing its name north to Johnson County for the first time. The building keeps its 1996 footprint and its brick and stucco exterior, just repainted, but the patio grows by 746 square feet and gains an adjacent 897-square-foot turfed area with a television screen, yard games, and more seating. The planning commission chair called it an improvement over what was there before, and one commissioner put the bigger picture plainly at that same meeting:
"It's almost like Town Center is now the hot place for restaurants."
The retail wave nobody had to vote on
While the restaurant rebuild works through demolition permits and tax districts, the retail side of Town Center has been filling in faster, without any council votes required. Here is what has actually opened or is confirmed to be coming, alongside the Lego store:
- Coach and The Coach Coffee Shop, with the coffee shop set to be only the third of its kind in the country, taking a space next to EVEREVE at Town Center Crossing
- Drybar, opening near Trader Joe's and Treats Unleashed
- [solidcore], a fitness studio opening between Athleta and Gorjana
- J.Crew, which has already opened near Kendra Scott and Bluemercury
- ALO, the California athleisure brand making its Johnson County debut with a fall opening planned near 119th Street
- Local Lime Tacos and Margaritas, among the newer tenant announcements this year
That is not a slow trickle. It is a shopping center adding a new name every few weeks for most of 2026. The mix leans toward brands people will drive across the metro for, the kind of specialty retail that treats a store opening as an event rather than a soft launch, which is exactly what the Lego line in the rain looked like.
A different kind of growth two miles south
Not every corner of Leawood is filling in the same way. In April, Burg and Barrel opened its fourth location overall and second in Leawood at Ranch Mart North, the shopping center at 95th Street and Mission Road where Leawood, Prairie Village, and Overland Park all meet. It is a locally owned burger spot, not a national chain, and co-owner Jake Chappelow said he was surprised by how steady business was in its first few days, even over a holiday stretch.
The space is Burg and Barrel's largest yet at 4,200 square feet, and what makes it different from a Town Center storefront is what sits just outside the door. The restaurant backs up to a public green space at Ranch Mart North that hosts concerts and other events, and it sits near the Parkinson's Exercise and Wellness Center, which the ownership already partners with for an annual "Pint for Parkinson's" fundraiser. It operates near two other Ranch Mart tenants, healthy eatery Billie's Grocery and barbecue spot Meat Mitch, in a corridor that has quietly built its own identity around locally owned food rather than national retail.
The corner is changing, not just the storefronts
Put those two stories side by side and a pattern shows up that neither one tells on its own. Town Center Plaza is trading its oldest, most institutional tenants, a 1990s steakhouse and a national casual-dining chain, for a mix of national specialty retail and a taxpayer-financed upscale restaurant row, with the city itself underwriting part of the bet through a special sales tax. A few miles south, Ranch Mart North is growing in the opposite direction, adding locally owned concepts tied to neighborhood events and causes rather than brands chasing metro-wide draw.
Both are real growth. They are just not the same growth, and knowing which corner is becoming which is the kind of thing you only pick up by watching the actual permits, votes, and grand openings rather than skimming a "new stores" list. If you have driven past either shopping center this year and wondered what exactly was going on behind the construction fencing, now you know.
If you are watching how a neighborhood like this one changes, block by block and permit by permit, and want someone who reads the same city council agendas we do, reach out to Dana Benjamin. We would love to talk through what is happening in your corner of Johnson County, whether you are thinking about a move or just want to understand your own neighborhood better.
