For twenty years, the answer to "what's next for Lake Highlands" pointed at one intersection. The Town Center at Skillman and Walnut Hill was supposed to become the neighborhood's downtown, and every conversation about growth started there. That intersection is still moving, slowly. What is striking about the past twelve months is how much of the actual momentum has landed somewhere else.
The openings that arrived between spring 2025 and summer 2026 are not clustered around the Town Center. They are spread across three corridors that residents already drive through every day, and together they suggest the neighborhood's center of gravity is quietly reorganizing around infrastructure and independent operators rather than the long-planned anchor site.
The Skillman spine finally has a bridge, and new tenants to match
The single most consequential piece of 2025 was not a restaurant. It was a piece of concrete. In September, Kathy Stewart and other local officials gathered for a ribbon cutting ceremony for the Skillman Street Arch Bridge, a project that had spanned close to two decades from its inception. A bridge that took that long to open changes traffic patterns the day it does, and the storefronts along Skillman are the first to feel it.
Two of them are worth walking into.
Brothers Esneyder and Richard Ospina opened the first U.S. location of Unimarket, a Latin American one-stop shop for dinner, coffee or groceries to take home, sixteen years after opening the first Unimarket in Calgary, Canada, where three locations remain. The brothers transformed a Lake Highlands space that formerly housed a tanning salon into their home away from home. After beginning a soft opening on Jan. 10, Unimarket already has dedicated regulars. Current soft opening hours are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., extending to 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. for the official grand opening. The address is 7215 Skillman St. A Colombian market anchoring a former tanning salon is the kind of tenant swap that only happens when the surrounding traffic count justifies it.
A little further up the corridor, Waters Edge Winery and Bistro opened in March, when owners Kate and Chris Vahdani opened Lake Highlands' first commercial winery as part of a national franchise concept. A commercial winery is a commitment to sit-down evening traffic, which the neighborhood has historically leaked to Lakewood and Lower Greenville.
And in April 2025, Lake Highlands neighbor Dave Culwell opened Burger Schmurger, his first brick-and-mortar restaurant, after years of operating as a pop-up. A pop-up graduating to a lease is a lagging indicator that the operator ran the numbers on foot traffic and decided the corridor could support fixed rent.
Read together, those three openings are a specific bet: that the Skillman corridor south of the arch bridge is going to carry more evening and weekend traffic than it did a year ago.
Northwest Highway at Plano Road, quietly
The Northview Plaza shopping center at 10677 E. Northwest Hwy has had a rough decade for restaurant tenants. The space has seen a succession of sports-bar concepts over the years. It was most recently home to Tailgaters Sports Bar & Grill, before that Jake's Gameday, a spinoff of the Dallas chain Jakes Burgers & Beer that occupied the location for four years, and previously End Zone Bar & Grill.
That is a lot of closures in one address. The current tenant is trying something different.
Charlie's Tavern & Kitchen is now serving burgers, wings, and elevated pub fare at 10677 E. Northwest Hwy. #400 at the intersection of Plano Road, in the Northview Plaza shopping center. The concept comes from restaurateur Justin Newton, an entrepreneur with 20 years of hotel and restaurant experience. The Lake Highlands location is his second Charlie's Tavern & Kitchen, following the debut of the original in Arlington near the University of Texas at Arlington in February. Newton retained much of the staff from the previous restaurant, including some employees who have worked in the space through several concepts and management teams over the past decade. He is aiming to create the welcoming, neighborhood spirit of the famous TV bar Cheers, where customers feel more like friends.
Retaining the staff of a shuttered sports bar to convert the same room into a neighborhood pub is a specific bet on regulars over destination diners. It is also a small signal about who the Northwest Highway corridor now serves: people who live within a two-mile radius, not people driving in from elsewhere in Dallas for a game.
The Central Expressway edge picked up a family draw
The western edge of Lake Highlands has never had a genuine indoor family entertainment venue at the scale of what the northern suburbs offer. That gap is closing.
Slick City, an indoor action park designed for all ages, is preparing to open a new franchise location. The dry slide and air court park will be located at Royal Lane and 75 between Studio Movie Grill and the Northaven Trail. Inside the former Conn's appliance store, visitors to Slick City North Dallas will find year-round family entertainment, with air courts, tumbling lanes, kid-friendly activity zones, patented slides and other high-energy experiences. The address is 11250 N. Central Expressway, Suite #150.
The location matters. A dead appliance box next to a movie theater and the Northaven Trail is the kind of adaptive reuse that pulls weekend traffic off Central Expressway and into the neighborhood grid. Families who used to drive to Frisco or Plano for a rainy Saturday afternoon now have a closer option on the Lake Highlands side of 75.
What the Town Center is, and is not, doing
None of this means the Town Center is finished. It is still moving.
Lake Highlands Town Center is a developing mixed-use, walkable neighborhood built near the Lake Highlands Station served by the DART Rail Blue Line. The 70-acre development at full build-out will include over 300,000+ square feet in office/retail mix spaces and 1,200 residential units. Other attractions in the area include the 20-acre Watercrest Park with a jogging trail, a lake and an outdoor amphitheater. Pedestrian activity is encouraged along Wildcat Way, a promenade lined with trees, where shopping, dining and entertainment options are available for employees and residents in the area.
On the residential side, the first phase, Haven Lake Highlands, is a residential four-story wrap structure hosting 259 units, ranging in size from 518 square-foot studios to 1,286 square-foot three-bedroom homes.
The clearest read on the Town Center's arc came a few years back from the developer who took over the project:
The development firm reimagined the town center as a village green, with pocket parks, family-friendly restaurants and services such as dry cleaners and hair salons. "What was originally conceived was very grand, more aspirational than what was commercially feasible," Rafkin says.
That reads honestly. The Town Center is now a village green with services, not a downtown with a skyline, and the growth this past year has proved that a neighborhood does not need a single anchor to add new places. It can add them corridor by corridor.
A housing signal in the middle of it all
One more datapoint worth holding: builders are pricing in the traffic. Mattamy Homes has started development on Lake Highlands Village in Northeast Dallas, a gated townhome community with 85 homes and private garages. Sales for Lake Highlands Village are expected to start in June 2027. The community will include three-story townhomes, each spanning across 2,000 square feet of space. The site is at 718 N Buckner Blvd.
An 85-unit gated townhome build is not speculative. That kind of density on Buckner requires a builder who believes the surrounding corridor will look meaningfully different in three years than it does now. It is a private-capital bet that lines up with the small-operator bets happening a mile west on Skillman.
What to take from the last twelve months
If you live here, the practical takeaway is simple. A Colombian market, a winery bistro, a graduated pop-up burger operator, a Cheers-inspired pub in a space that has burned through tenants for a decade, and an indoor slide park in a dead big-box are not thematically connected. What they share is a location logic. Each one sits on a corridor that just got easier to reach, either because a bridge finally opened, because a shopping center found a tenant willing to work with the room instead of against it, or because a family-scale draw filled a vacant box next to existing weekend traffic.
The Town Center will keep filling in, and the DART station will keep doing its work. The more useful map for a Lake Highlands resident right now is the one drawn by the past year of openings on Skillman, Northwest Highway, and the Central corridor.
If you are weighing a move within Lake Highlands, thinking about a renovation, or trying to understand what these shifts mean for the value of what you already own, Donna J Hartley works this neighborhood daily. Schedule a Free Consultation for a construction-informed read on where the corridor is heading next.
