Walk Kelvin from Morningside toward University this month and you will hit orange construction fencing twice inside four blocks. Both stretches of mesh look the same from the sidewalk. Both slow down foot traffic and force a detour around a plywood wall. But the two projects behind them are not related, are not owned by the same company, and are not headed toward the same outcome for anyone who walks these blocks on a Tuesday evening or a Sunday morning.
One fence is wrapped around a property that is being deliberately rebuilt to be more walkable. The other sits next to a condo tower that topped out this spring and has spent the past year tangled in a property dispute with the shopping center next door. Knowing which fence is which changes how you read the next few months in the Village.
The Corner Getting Rebuilt on Purpose
The retail plaza at 2400 Times Boulevard, spanning parcels along Times and Rice Boulevards, sold for the first time in decades last year to Fifth Corner, a Houston-based firm that focuses on urban retail properties. The site totals roughly 66,000 square feet of combined retail and office space, and after months of planning, construction crews broke ground this year on a project the firm calls Village Corner.
The architecture firm behind the redesign, Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, is adding new facades, expanded patios, and public seating meant to tie the corner more tightly into the rest of the district's foot traffic. CTC Contractors is handling the build, Rebel Retail Advisors is leading the leasing, and the work is expected to wrap by the fourth quarter of this year.
What makes this project worth watching isn't the construction schedule. It's the tenant list, because Fifth Corner has been explicit that this is not a teardown. The corner's long-running names are staying put through the renovation:
- La Taste
- Salento Bistrot
- Café Rabelais
- Torchy's Tacos
Layered in around them are the new arrivals. Jones Road Beauty is opening its first Houston store in the space that used to hold Mac Cosmetics, right across Times Boulevard. Hill House Home, opening its first permanent Houston boutique this fall, is taking over the former Lily Rain storefront on Kelvin, and Lily Rain itself hasn't left the district. It relocated a few doors down into the old Francesca's space at 2515 University Boulevard. Thursday Boot Co. leased space at 5407 Kelvin, and Kinokuniya is converting a former Village Fitness location at 2369 Rice Boulevard into a Japanese bookstore, its second location in the area, with buildout expected to finish around February.
That is a corner being reshuffled, not emptied. The fencing there is a promise with a date attached to it.
The Corner That's Still in Court, Not Just Under Construction
A few blocks away, at the corner of Rice Boulevard and Chaucer Street, Randall Davis Company topped out The Chaucer this spring, a 14-story condo tower with 33 residences that will eventually sell for between $1.7 million and $5.55 million a unit. Topping out means the vertical structure is finished. It does not mean the fence comes down, because the tower sits on a tight 17,500-square-foot lot immediately next to Village Square, an existing strip of shops, and the two properties have been fighting over that shared property line for over a year.
David Gibbs Associates, which owns Village Square, sued Randall Davis Company last summer, claiming construction crews damaged a sign, tore up part of the parking lot, and built fencing a foot past the actual property line into an already narrow driveway. Tenants along that stretch, including British Isles, described a closed sidewalk on Rice Boulevard and a closed traffic lane during that stretch of the build. Randall Davis agreed to a temporary injunction barring further encroachment not long after the suit was filed.
The fight didn't end there. This spring it resurfaced as a dispute over the tower's construction crane: a judge granted Village Square's owners a new injunction ordering the crane to stay clear of the fence line, the owners then said they caught the developer violating that order about a month later, and Randall Davis Company appealed, with a judge set to revisit the matter later in May. Neither side has said publicly what happened after that.
The practical difference for anyone walking the district: Village Corner has a construction calendar with a stated end. This corner has a legal calendar, and legal calendars don't publish quarterly targets.
| Village Corner (Times & Rice Blvd) | Village Square / The Chaucer (Rice Blvd & Chaucer St) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who's behind it | Fifth Corner (owner), Michael Hsu Office of Architecture (design) | Randall Davis Company (tower developer) vs. David Gibbs Associates (Village Square owner) |
| What's happening | Planned renovation of an owned property | Tower topped out; property-line dispute now in its second round, over crane use |
| Tenant status | Legacy tenants staying, new leases signed | Existing tenants report sidewalk and lane closures during the dispute |
| Expected timeline | Q4 2026 | Tower expected complete October 2027; legal dispute has no published resolution date |
| Effect on the walk | Temporary detour, designed to end in more patio space | Ongoing friction with an unresolved endpoint |
What Doesn't Pause for Any of This
None of the construction has touched the rhythm that actually anchors a lot of weekends here. The Rice Village Farmers Market still runs the first and third Sunday of every month, rain or shine, the same schedule it has held for years. If you've timed a Sunday morning coffee run around it before, that habit still works.
The restaurant turnover that always defines this district hasn't slowed down either. Liberty Kitchen & Oysterette, the Gulf Coast seafood concept from Culinary Khancepts, is set to open its third location on November 5 in the former Gratify space at 5212 Morningside, a block that has nothing to do with either fenced-off corner. The new spot will seat 112 inside, 18 at the bar, and 50 more on a patio, with a rotating chef's table menu on top of the usual gumbo and redfish. It's one more sign that the district keeps absorbing change on multiple fronts at once without any single project dictating the whole neighborhood's pace.
Reading the Fences Correctly This Fall
If you're routing a walk through the Village between now and the end of the year, the useful distinction isn't "there's construction happening." It's which construction you're looking at. Detour around Times and Rice Boulevards and you're watching a landlord invest in the property you already like, with a stated finish line. Detour around Rice Boulevard near Chaucer Street and you're walking past a building that's structurally finished but still tied up in a fight over the ten feet of ground between it and its neighbor.
The mesh fencing looks identical from the street. The paperwork behind each one does not.
Both will eventually come down. One will likely leave behind wider patios and a slightly different tenant mix built around names the district has carried for years. The other depends on how a lawsuit resolves, which isn't something a construction schedule can answer.
Rice Village has absorbed bigger shifts than this before, and the mix of legacy tenants staying put alongside new leases signed suggests the district's core character isn't the part that's up for negotiation. It's worth remembering that the next time a chalk sandwich board redirects your usual path to lunch.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood this closely because you're weighing a move into it, or out of it, Callis & Co Realty LLC works this side of Houston alongside Bellaire, West University, and the surrounding inner-loop pockets every week. Monica Callis can walk you through what a corner like this actually means for a purchase decision, not just a Sunday stroll. Let's Connect.
