Walk the sidewalk along Richard Jones Road this week and you'll see it before you can name it: new signage going up over the storefront at 2035, the kind of quiet construction activity that means something is about to open rather than something is about to close. On September 16, that storefront becomes Lupo Notte, an upscale Italian restaurant from Southern Land Company, the developer that built Vertis Green Hills in the first place. Nine days from now, the ground floor at the corner of Hillsboro Pike and Richard Jones Road will be serving its fifth restaurant.
Nobody at Southern Land Company announced a restaurant row when Vertis opened. The tower went up as a luxury apartment building with some ground-floor retail attached, the kind of amenity space that fills in slowly and unevenly, one lease at a time. That's exactly what happened. Brixx Wood Fire Pizza signed on. Then Char. Then Santo. Then True Food Kitchen, the national health-focused concept known for building its menu around produce and simple technique rather than heavy sauces. Four restaurants, four separate deals, four different timelines, and no single press release tying them together. Lupo Notte is the fifth, and it's the first one Southern Land Company built for itself instead of leasing to someone else.
A Developer Cooking Its Own Food
That last detail is worth sitting with. Southern Land Company has built and leased commercial space across dozens of mixed-use communities, including Westhaven in Franklin, where The Boardroom restaurant operates inside a project the company already developed. In every one of those cases, the developer built the space and someone else ran the kitchen. Lupo Notte breaks that pattern. It's Southern Land Company's first full-service restaurant, meaning the same company that poured the foundation is now also plating the pasta.
A company that has spent years building restaurant space for other operators just decided to become one.
The kitchen will be run by Executive Chef Owen Lane, a Tennessee native who grew up on a family farm in Leipers Fork and has spent nearly three decades in restaurants. His resume includes a run as Executive Sous Chef at Pastis, stints at Audrey and June in East Nashville, and time at The Boardroom in Franklin, the same Westhaven restaurant mentioned above. General Manager David Rehrmann brings his own Nashville pedigree, having previously led acclaimed restaurants including A Voce in New York City along with Modern Italian and Zuzu here in town. Between the two of them, Lupo Notte arrives with more actual restaurant-opening experience than most Green Hills debuts get.
The design leans into the corner it occupies. Southern Land Company's in-house design team worked with Nashville-based HASTINGS Architecture to expand the space into the courtyard, turning what had been a service alley into a lit, glass-walled extension of the dining room. If you've walked past that courtyard in the evening over the past year and wondered why it always felt half-finished, this is the answer. It wasn't waiting for landscaping. It was waiting for a restaurant to grow into it.
What's Already Cooking on That Corner
Before Lupo Notte, here's what a resident already had to choose from without leaving the building:
- Brixx Wood Fire Pizza for a fast, casual dinner that doesn't require a reservation
- Char for something a step up from a weeknight meal
- Santo as another sit-down option in the same footprint
- True Food Kitchen when the goal is a lighter plate and produce-forward cooking
That's four full-service restaurants inside one address, not counting the non-dining tenants sharing the same ground floor, including Corepower Yoga, Spoke & Weal, and PAINT Nail Bar. Most single-address developments settle for one restaurant, maybe two, and call it an amenity. Vertis kept adding them until it stopped being an amenity and started being a decision tree. Pizza or pasta. Fast or slow. That choice now exists at a single valet stand, which is a different thing than a neighborhood having five good restaurants scattered across a mile of Hillsboro Pike. This is five restaurants sharing one address, one parking structure, and one walk from the elevator.
Why the Address Matters More Than the Menu
The interesting part isn't any single restaurant. It's what happens when a developer keeps signing leases in the same footprint long enough that the footprint starts to function like its own dining district. Green Hills has plenty of good restaurants. What it hasn't had, until this month, is a single building where you can genuinely change your mind about dinner without getting back in the car. Forgot to make a reservation at Char? Santo is thirty feet away. Craving something lighter than what Lupo Notte is serving? True Food Kitchen is on the same floor. That kind of flexibility usually requires driving between three or four different strip centers along Hillsboro Pike. At Vertis, it requires walking across a courtyard.
This is also a useful lens for anyone comparing Green Hills to other close-in Nashville neighborhoods. The commercial density that makes a corner feel alive isn't just square footage of retail. It's how many independent decisions a resident can make within the same walk. A restaurant row that accumulates by accident, one signed lease at a time, tends to end up more varied than one that gets planned all at once, because each new tenant is filling whatever gap the last one left. Vertis didn't set out to cover pizza, upscale casual, health-focused, and now white-tablecloth Italian. It just kept leasing space until it did.
The One Thing on the Calendar That Isn't About a Lease
Not everything happening in Green Hills this month is tied to a construction timeline or a tenant announcement. On Saturday, September 12, Green Hills Park on Lone Oak Road hosts the tenth annual Green Hills Park Festival, organized entirely by volunteers through Friends of Green Hills Park. It's free, it's family and pet friendly, and in past years it has featured local vendors, live music, food trucks, and an outdoor movie to close out the night. Every dollar raised goes back into the park itself, not into anyone's redevelopment budget.
It's worth marking for a reason beyond the entertainment. The festival is the one recurring event in Green Hills that has nothing to do with which building is under construction or which restaurant just opened. It ran before Vertis existed and it'll keep running regardless of what gets built next on Hillsboro Pike. For a neighborhood currently experiencing a real wave of commercial change, that kind of constancy is worth noticing on its own terms.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
If you live within walking distance of Vertis, the practical change is smaller than the headline suggests but real all the same. You now have a fifth full option on a corner that a year ago had three. You can walk to a genuinely different kind of Tuesday night dinner than the one you had on Monday, without needing a second stop or a longer drive down Hillsboro Pike. And if you want a reminder that the neighborhood existed before any of this construction started, Lone Oak Road has one waiting for you on September 12, free of charge, run by the same volunteers who've done it for ten years running.
Green Hills keeps changing shape one lease and one festival flyer at a time. Most of it doesn't get announced together, which is exactly why it's easy to miss until you're standing on the sidewalk looking at new signage and realizing the corner you drive past every day just quietly became something else.
If you're thinking about what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, not just on a listing sheet, that's the kind of read Susan Gregory built her practice around. Request a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what Green Hills, or any corner of Williamson County and greater Nashville, might look like for your next move.
