Drive north on North Druid Hills Road past the new Chick-fil-A, the one without a drive-thru that replaced the three-lane version down the street back in 2024, and you'll hit 78 acres of graded dirt, construction fencing, and a handful of cranes. That's the former North DeKalb Mall. Depending on which press release you read over the past two years, shops there were supposed to be open by now.

They're not. And understanding exactly why tells you more about what's coming than any tenant list does.

The Timeline Everyone Quoted, and the One That's Actually Happening

When EDENS bought the failing mall in 2021 and demolition finally started in the summer of 2024, early coverage cited a simple, optimistic marker: first mixed-use spaces open in 2026. That number showed up in reporting at the time and became the shorthand residents repeated to each other while watching the wrecking crews work.

That number has already slipped.

None of this means the project stalled. It means an enclosed 1965 mall, the first fully air-conditioned one in metro Atlanta, takes longer to unwind than a press release can capture. By April 2025, Decide DeKalb's president was fielding questions from residents who hadn't seen visible movement since the debris got hauled away and had to explain that the developer had already put $50 million into the ground before a single wall went up. Vertical construction on the first residential building didn't actually break ground until December 2025, a year and a half after demolition started.

If you've been checking the site expecting storefronts, that's why you haven't seen any. If you check again next spring, you still won't. The useful marker to hold onto isn't 2026. It's the first quarter of 2027.

What's Actually Rising Right Now

As of this year, two builders have crews on site simultaneously, working on different pieces of the same master plan.

Crescent Communities is building Novel Lulah Hills, a six-story, 303-unit apartment building with studios up to three-bedrooms and more than 39,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. The building includes a resident social hub called The Mercantile Club with a resort-style pool and cabanas, a fitness studio called The Rose Room, and a diner-style lounge called The Gathering Place. It fronts a newly built street called Lula Avenue, which will become the project's main commercial spine. Deliveries are expected late 2027.

Separately, Empire Homes is building 92 for-sale townhomes on another portion of the site.

Neither of those is retail. That's worth sitting with for a second, because it changes what "opening" actually means here. The apartments are going vertical first. The shops come after.

The Tenant List, and What It Actually Signals

In March 2026, EDENS announced the first wave of confirmed retail and restaurant tenants for Lulah Hills:

• Anthropologie, which currently has locations scattered from Alpharetta to Buckhead, will get a new spot here.
• Design Within Reach and Herman Miller are both opening their second Atlanta locations. Both brands currently only have a presence in West Midtown, so this marks their first foothold on this side of the city.
• Firepit Pizza Tavern, the current operators of a Grant Park location, are expanding here.
• Honeysuckle Gelato, an Atlanta-based shop that started as a food truck before opening its first storefront at Ponce City Market, is adding this as a new location.
• Solidcore, Les Mains Nail Bar, and LaserAway round out the wellness and personal care side.
• Refuge Coffee, the Clarkston-based coffeehouse, was slated to open this spring in a former gas station where North Druid Hills Road meets Mistletoe Road, just north of the main site. That one sits outside the mall footprint itself but is part of the same wave of investment along the corridor.

The existing anchors aren't going anywhere in the meantime. Marshalls stays open through construction, and the AMC Theatres on site remains open too, though it's being downsized from 16 screens to 11 as the building gets reconfigured. A Publix grocery store, roughly 50,000 square feet, is also planned but hasn't broken ground as of this year.

None of this opens before the first quarter of 2027. That's the developer's own stated target, not a delay estimate from outside observers.

What This Means If You Live Nearby

For the next twelve to eighteen months, the practical experience of living near this site looks less like watching a shopping center open and more like watching two large construction projects run in parallel behind fencing, with occasional visible progress; a building frame here, a parking structure there.

A few things worth tracking if you're local:

• The apartment building along Lula Avenue is the piece to watch for visible change first, since it's the furthest along.
• Marshalls and the AMC theater keep operating as normal, so day-to-day errands and movie nights on that stretch aren't disrupted by the construction happening around them.
• Refuge Coffee, if it opened on schedule this spring, is the first genuinely new, walk-in business tied to this redevelopment that residents can actually visit today, separate from the mall's main construction zone.
• The bigger site plan includes greenway connections to the Clyde Shepherd Nature Preserve and to Emory University, though those links are still in the planning stages and don't have a firm completion date attached.

It's also worth knowing that Lulah Hills isn't the only thing reshaping this general area. A few miles south, the Emory Village Alliance spent three years pushing through a new zoning overlay aimed at turning the historic commercial strip along North Decatur Road into a denser, more walkable district. That's a separate project with a separate timeline, but it's part of the same broader pattern: this corridor, long defined by an empty mall and a handful of aging strip centers, is being rebuilt piece by piece rather than all at once.

The Honest Read

If a neighbor tells you the mall site is "supposed to open this year," they're repeating a number that was accurate in 2024 and hasn't been accurate since. The developer's own current timeline puts the first stores and restaurants at Lulah Hills opening in the first quarter of 2027, with the first apartments delivering later that same year. Full buildout, all 1,800 planned residential units and the full 320,000 square feet of retail, doesn't have a public completion date attached at all right now.

That's not a criticism of the project. Enclosed malls built in 1965 don't unwind on press-release schedules, and the fact that two builders now have cranes on site simultaneously is real progress compared to two years of an empty, fenced lot. It just means the honest answer to "when does this open" is 2027, not 2026, and the honest answer to "when is it finished" is not yet known.

If you're weighing what a changing corridor like this means for your own plans, whether that's timing a move, understanding how nearby redevelopment tends to affect a neighborhood over several years, or just making sense of what you're seeing out the car window, the David Lawhon Group knows this stretch of DeKalb County closely and can walk you through what it's likely to mean for the area around you. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through it.