Drive the frontage road past the Charles Schwab campus on State Highway 114 and you'll see it: office towers on one side, open land on the other, right where 114 forks into 170. Anyone who works at Schwab, Fidelity, or Deloitte University has looked at that corner and wondered when it stops being empty. The honest answer, as of this month, is that nobody outside Hillwood's leasing office knows exactly when, and the town's own paper trail explains why the wait has already lasted longer than most people assume.
The land belongs to Circle T Ranch, the 2,500-acre Hillwood property that anchors this stretch of Westlake. The section closest to the highway, the 44 acres facing both 114 and 170, is what the developer branded Front 44. The Town of Westlake's own economic development page places it directly north of the Charles Schwab campus, which is exactly the view you get from the frontage road.
What Actually Got Approved in 2024
Here's the part most residents missed. Front 44 didn't start as a February 2026 press release. It started with a site plan for 16.38 acres between SH-170, SH-114, and Schwab Way, and Westlake's Town Council approved it in a joint meeting with the Planning and Zoning Commission on April 1, 2024. That approval allowed up to six restaurants on that first slice of ground.
Two years is a long time to sit on an entitlement for six restaurants and have none of them open. That gap between what got approved and what got built is the first sign that this project moves in phases, and that public approval is not the same milestone as a grand opening.
The Bigger Version Showed Up in February
The scope residents are actually talking about now surfaced in coverage from February 2026, and it's considerably larger than the 2024 filing. The plan calls for more than 65,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, a 150-room upscale hotel, and a 54,000-square-foot Class A office building, arranged around a roughly 10,000-square-foot outdoor plaza. Dallas-based GFF is the architecture firm on record. Parking is being pushed to the exterior of the site on purpose, so the interior reads as a place to walk rather than a parking lot with storefronts attached.
Hillwood's Vice President of Retail, Guy Grivas, told reporters the company was in active conversations with prospective tenants for about half the project, including a steakhouse concept. His estimate for the rest of the mix: 70 to 80 percent food and beverage, the remaining share split among health and wellness tenants. Reporting tied to the Dallas Business Journal put a construction start in the third quarter of 2026, with completion targeted for 2027.
That timeline puts groundbreaking right around now. It has not been confirmed publicly.
Why the Neighbors Wanted This
The pressure behind Front 44 didn't come from residential demand. It came from the office parks. Schwab's Westlake campus holds roughly 7,000 employees. Fidelity Investments runs another 6,000 to 6,400 out of its campus nearby. Deloitte University, the corporate training center on the same ranch, brings in roughly 75,000 visitors a year, a figure the project's own marketing materials say is expanding toward 150,000.
Reporting on the project has pointed to Schwab executives directly asking Hillwood for more dining and lodging within walking distance of their own campus, a request Hillwood has cited as part of the reasoning for putting retail and a hotel at the ranch's front entrance rather than deeper inside it. That is a specific, named business need, not a developer's guess about what the market wants. Thousands of people already show up to this corner every weekday. Right now, most of them leave the ranch to eat.
What Hasn't Happened Yet
This is the part worth saying plainly, because it's easy to read a press cycle from February and assume the project is already rising out of the ground. As of this writing in September 2026, there is no public record of a groundbreaking ceremony, and no restaurant, retailer, or hotel brand has been named as a signed tenant. Coverage from earlier this year specifically flagged formal tenant announcements and a groundbreaking date as the next things to watch for. Neither has landed yet.
Layer that onto the 2024 entitlement for six restaurants on a smaller slice of the same land, and the pattern becomes clear. Westlake has approved retail and restaurant space at this interchange more than once, on two different scales, across roughly two years, and the corner is still open land. Approval is a legal milestone. It is not a construction milestone, and it is not a move-in date.
What To Actually Watch For
If you live or work near this corner and want a signal that's more reliable than a headline, here's where to look:
- Town Council agendas and minutes. Site plan amendments, infrastructure votes, and impact fee ordinances tied to Circle T Ranch show up there before they show up anywhere else.
- Vertical construction permits. The distinction matters. Grading and utility work can start well before a building permit is pulled for anything you'd actually walk into.
- Fencing and grading at the SH-114/170 interchange itself. That's the physical tell that construction has moved from planning documents to dirt.
- Formal leasing announcements from Hillwood. A named steakhouse, a hotel flag, or a signed retail tenant will come from the developer directly, not from a rendering.
None of that has happened publicly yet. When it does, it will be the first hard evidence that the 2027 completion estimate is holding.
For now, the honest way to describe this corner is exactly what it looks like from the road: an approved plan, a well-documented demand from the campuses next door, and a still-empty field. If you commute past Schwab every day, that's not a reason to expect dinner reservations by next spring. It's a reason to keep watching the same intersection you already drive through twice a day, because whatever opens there next will tell you more about Westlake's next few years than any press release has so far.
If you're weighing what a project like this means for property near Circle T Ranch, or you just want a straight answer about what's actually confirmed versus what's still speculation, Richard Noon has been tracking Westlake's development pipeline long enough to tell the difference. Let's Connect.
