If you live in Timberridge, you've made the turn off Custer Road onto University Drive more times than you can count. The Chick-fil-A on the corner has been there since March 2024, long enough that it stopped registering as new sometime last year. What's easy to miss, driving past at the same speed you always do, is that everything around it, the grocery store, the sushi place, the nail spa, the apartment buildings still going up behind the retail, has been arriving in pieces for two and a half years. And the piece that would actually make the place feel finished still hasn't landed.
West Grove reads like a completed shopping center from the road. It isn't. Community Impact reported that the 52-acre development has been assembling itself in a specific order since 2022. That order is worth understanding if you live a few minutes away, because it tells you what to expect next and roughly when.
The Order So Far
McKinney signed an economic development agreement with De La Vega Capital and Development in March 2022, and Whole Foods was announced as the anchor tenant that same month. Nothing opened for almost two years after that. The first construction permits for retail buildings weren't issued until December 2023, with four more following in February 2024.
Chick-fil-A was the first thing to actually open, in March 2024, sitting alone on a mostly empty pad for months while the rest of the site was still dirt. It took until December 2024 for the developer to announce the next wave, fourteen businesses signing leases at once: Sephora, Velvet Taco, Chipotle, Chewy Vet Care, Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, Keke's Breakfast Cafe, Sweet Paris Crêperie, La La Land Kind Cafe, Paciugo Gelato, OrangeTwist, Reformed Pilates, Resort Nail Spa, and PNC Bank, all slated to open sometime in 2025.
By the following spring, the first two construction phases were open to the public, with Velvet Taco, Chewy Vet Care, and OrangeTwist confirmed running. Whole Foods followed not long after, opening its doors in late August 2025, roughly a year and a half after Chick-fil-A and more than three years after the anchor deal was first announced.
Community Impact quoted McKinney's Assistant City Manager Jennifer Arnold, who worked as the city's planning director when West Grove went through the approval process, saying when the first phases opened that it was
"exciting to see that they've been able to deliver on the things that were only a vision in their head five years ago."
That's the pace this kind of project actually runs at, planning stretching years before the tenant list gets announced all at once and makes the opening sound imminent.
What Still Isn't Here
Three things anchor the next stretch, and none of them have opened yet as of this writing.
Chuy's confirmed in December 2025 that it will bring its first McKinney location to a 1.92-acre site on the south side of West University Drive, inside the West Grove planned development. The building is expected to run about 6,600 square feet with a full bar and outdoor patio, and the company has said it's targeting 2026 for opening, without a firm month attached yet.
The residential piece, the part that turns a retail strip into an actual walkable district, is even further out. Milhaus is building 420 luxury apartment units on site, averaging around 1,000 square feet each, with delivery expected in winter 2026. That's more than a year after Whole Foods opened its doors and nearly three years after Chick-fil-A did.
A third construction phase is also on the calendar, with the developer indicating work would begin sometime in 2026. No details have been released on what that phase includes.
Why the Apartments Come Last
The build order isn't random, and it's not unique to West Grove. Grocery and quick-serve tenants like Whole Foods and Chick-fil-A can prove out traffic at a highway intersection fast: they open, count cars, and know within a season whether the location works. Apartment developers move slower because leasing 420 units depends on the surrounding retail already existing, not on projections of what might open next. That's one practical reason residential phases can land last on projects like this one. At West Grove, Milhaus is still finishing construction well after the grocery aisles have been stocked and restocked for a year.
For a Timberridge resident, that sequencing matters more than the ribbon-cuttings themselves. It means the character of West Grove, how busy it feels, how many storefronts sit dark on a Tuesday night, how easy it is to find parking, is still going to shift noticeably over the next twelve to eighteen months as the apartments fill in and the third phase gets built out.
Other Corners of the Corridor Aren't Waiting
Not everything on US-380 near Timberridge is mid-assembly. A few minutes further along the corridor, Third Monday Trade Days has been running since the 1870s, an 18-acre monthly market with the same rhythm it's had for generations, vendors selling antiques, vintage finds, and collectibles on the same weekend every month. Gray Branch Parkland, former farmland now part of an ongoing prairie restoration, sits nearby as a quieter option than the retail centers, native grasses and wildflowers drawing butterflies and bees rather than shoppers.
The contrast is useful. West Grove is still figuring out what it wants to be. The rest of the corridor already knows.
What This Means Over the Next Year
If you've treated West Grove as a finished shopping trip, grocery run at Whole Foods, dinner at Velvet Taco, drive home, it's worth knowing that the version you've been using is still an early draft of the final product. Expect Chuy's to open sometime this year without much advance notice on the exact date. Expect construction signage and equipment around the site to pick back up as the third phase breaks ground. And expect the apartment buildings behind the retail to actually fill with residents by winter, which will likely change parking availability and foot traffic patterns more than any single restaurant opening has so far.
None of that requires you to do anything differently today. It just means the next time someone asks what's new at West Grove, the honest answer is that it's still becoming whatever it's going to be, and the biggest change is the one that hasn't happened yet.
Ohlig Group tracks corridors like this one closely, because our neighbors in Timberridge and across McKinney ask about it constantly. If you want to talk through what's actually changing near you, or you're thinking ahead to what a corridor like this means for a future move, Book an Appointment with the Ohlig Group team.