If you drove past Ellis Preserve anytime between 2022 and late 2025, you got used to seeing a finished grocery store with no cars in the parking lot. The building sat there, done, dark, waiting. Then on January 18, 2026, the doors finally opened, and something unexpected happened. It wasn't just a grocery store that showed up. Within five months, three more businesses moved in around it, as if the whole property had been holding its breath.
That sequence, not the ribbon cuttings themselves, is the part worth understanding if you spend any time in Newtown Square. The wait wasn't random. And once it ended, the rest of the property didn't trickle in. It arrived in a cluster.
The One Tenant Everything Was Waiting On
Whole Foods signed its lease for the Ellis Preserve location years before it opened. By the time the store finally welcomed customers this January, nearly four years had passed since that lease was signed, and the building itself had been sitting complete for roughly a year and a half. For a stretch, this was the most finished, least used real estate on the whole 218-acre campus.
The 51,000-square-foot store opened at 3737 West Chester Pike with a pub built into it, the Darby Creek Cafe, where you can grab a quick meal, sit outside, or watch a game with a drink in hand. Store team leader John Frei framed the opening as a homecoming of sorts, telling the retailer's own release that the team was thrilled to join the Newtown Square community. The store also tied its debut to something local: on January 24, five percent of net sales went to the Marple Newtown School District's Black and Orange Fund, which supports student programs and scholarships in the district.
None of that delay was a secret. Anyone who shops at the Acme across West Chester Pike or either of the two Giant locations nearby watched this play out for years. What wasn't obvious from the outside was how much the rest of the development had been leaning on this one tenant to finally show up.
Then Three More Doors Opened in Five Months
Once Whole Foods opened in January, the pace changed fast.
Napa Kitchen and Wine opened February 11, less than a month later, at Equus Boulevard inside Ellis Preserve. This isn't a chain outpost. It's the brand's second location anywhere and its first-ever franchise, run by David and Lisa Trout along with business partner Darryl Brophy. The flagship opened in Richmond, Virginia, in 2022 under restaurateur Dennis Barbaro of DJB Hospitality, and Barbaro had already been eyeing this spot for a while, telling the Philadelphia Business Journal back in March 2024 that his group is selective about locations and that "Ellis Preserve hit all the buttons." The restaurant serves steaks, seafood, and hand-rolled sushi, and its private dining room seats up to 80, which tells you something about the kind of gatherings it expects to host.
Office Evolution followed by early April, setting up shop inside one of the campus's original historic buildings. The company leaned into that history rather than covering it up. The space includes a soundproofed podcast studio and something the operators call the Walken Room, a small conference room outfitted with two walking pads instead of chairs, so two people can take a meeting while walking instead of sitting. Members get free parking in a covered garage, and a heated walkway keeps the path clear in winter, a small but telling detail for anyone who's tried to cross an icy parking lot holding a laptop bag.
Cleavers Newtown Square closed the loop with a ribbon-cutting on June 20 at 103 Squire Drive. This is the sandwich shop's second location, after its original spot in Center City Philadelphia, and the choice of Newtown Square wasn't a real estate calculation for owners Dimitri and Electra Poulimenos. It's their hometown. Their family has spent 40 years in the steak business, and the shop's signature cheesesteaks are built on a proprietary cut of 100 percent domestic ribeye. The menu also covers chicken sandwiches, cheesesteak eggrolls, wraps, vegetarian options, and milkshakes, with hours running 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday and until 10 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.
Four openings, one grocery anchor, five months. That's not how mixed-use retail usually fills in.
Why the Wait Explains the Rush
Small operators don't sign leases in empty developments hoping foot traffic eventually shows up. They wait for proof. A grocery store that draws people multiple times a week is about as close to proof as retail gets, which is likely part of why Napa's ownership group was already talking about the site back in 2024, well before Whole Foods actually opened its doors. They weren't reacting to a finished project. They were positioning for one they expected to activate.
That's also consistent with what was already working at Ellis Preserve before any of this year's openings. Firepoint Grill and the low-key Founders Hall Café, tucked into a corporate building and run by specialty food group Luigi & Giovanni, had been serving the campus's office workers for years. The Hilton Garden Inn was already hosting overnight guests. The Ellis Ballroom, housed in the former Ellis College building with its columned façade and vaulted, chandeliered interior, was already booking weddings. None of that changed. What changed is that the property finally had a tenant capable of pulling in the same kind of routine foot traffic that a corporate campus and a wedding venue can't generate on their own.
What's Actually There Now, If You're Nearby
Practically, here's what a week at Ellis Preserve looks like as of this August. You can do a full grocery run at Whole Foods and grab a sandwich or a beer at the Darby Creek Cafe without leaving the building. You can walk over to Napa Kitchen and Wine for a steak dinner with a wine list built for a slower night out, or reserve the private room for a birthday or a work event. You can pick up a quick cheesesteak from Cleavers between errands. And if your home office needs a change of scenery, or your house is mid-renovation and too loud to work from, Office Evolution offers day passes into a coworking space with a podcast booth and that oddly specific walking-meeting room.
None of this required knowing the property's backstory, but it helps explain why the buildings feel the way they do. Ellis Preserve sits on what was once the Ellis School, founded in 1918 by Charles E. Ellis for girls without fathers. The school closed in the late 1970s, the land passed through ARCO and later SAP, and Equus Capital Partners acquired the 218-acre core in 2004 with plans to open the gated campus back up to the town around it. The stone cottages that now house small businesses were once classrooms and dormitories. The heritage detail Office Evolution mentioned in its own opening announcement wasn't marketing language. It's the literal building.
The Property Isn't Done Building
Ellis Preserve's retail side may have just reached full buildout, but the ownership group isn't slowing down. Equus Capital Partners is currently raising a $600 million fund aimed at multifamily properties, with $34.3 million raised as of a March 2026 SEC filing. That fund isn't specific to Ellis Preserve, but it's a reminder that the company treating this campus as, in its own words, a real estate laboratory is still actively deploying capital into the kind of properties that look a lot like this one. If the pattern from this spring holds, and it might not, expect more of that half-finished feeling to resolve itself in bursts rather than a slow trickle.
For now, if you've been putting off a visit to Ellis Preserve because there wasn't much there, that's no longer true. The wait is over, and so is the slow part.
If you're weighing a move in or around Newtown Square and want a read on what a property near a development like this is actually worth right now, the Houder Nunez-Strid Team knows this stretch of the Main Line block by block. Schedule a Confidential Market Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
