For three years, anyone living in Westwood who heads north on Loop 360 toward Davenport Village or St. Stephen's Episcopal School learned to plan around a stretch of orange barrels. The Westlake Drive and Cedar Street intersections, a few miles up the corridor from Westwood's own stretch of Bee Caves Road, turned into a nightly construction zone every time TxDOT touched them. Then, sometime in the last twelve months, the noise moved on. What most residents haven't connected is that the timing of that departure lines up almost exactly with a second, unrelated-seeming change: the shopping center at the end of that same drive finally has something worth stopping for.
Those two facts are not a coincidence of scheduling. They're the same project, viewed from two different ends.
Where the construction actually is right now
The Texas Department of Transportation has been rebuilding the Westlake Drive and Cedar Street intersections since June 2022, part of a $72.1 million effort to remove the traffic signals from Loop 360's main lanes and replace them with underpasses. Westwood itself sits south of that work, along Bee Caves Road, but Loop 360 north is still the route most locals take for school runs, coffee at Davenport Village, or anything past the Pennybacker Bridge, so the construction was hard to avoid even for residents who never touched those two intersections directly.
The Westlake Drive bridge opened on August 1, 2025, twenty days ahead of schedule and just before the first day of classes at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, according to the school's own account of the milestone. Cedar Street followed at the end of 2025. With both bridges in place, TxDOT expects the full Westlake Drive/Cedar Street project to wrap by late 2026.
Here's the part that matters if you've been dreading another summer of lane closures: the next phase of the Loop 360 program isn't on Westwood's regular drive anymore. TxDOT broke ground in April 2026 on a $68.4 million overhaul of Loop 360 at Courtyard Drive and RM 2222, several miles north of the Westlake Drive/Cedar Street work Westwood commuters just lived through. It's the same playbook, an underpass and a diverging diamond interchange to pull signals off the main lanes, but it's happening in a different part of the corridor entirely. The disruption Westwood already absorbed bought the neighborhood a stretch of finished road while the next round of dust and detours lands somewhere else first.
That's the quiet mechanism behind a project most people only experience as noise: TxDOT has been moving north, one intersection at a time, on purpose, so that no two phases overlap and no single neighborhood carries the burden twice in a row.
What the finished road actually connects to
The reason the Westlake Drive bridge mattered so much wasn't just traffic flow. It's what TxDOT itself said the finished corridor was meant to unlock. Katherine Seth, the agency's public involvement contact for the Loop 360 program, described the vision this way once the bridges were complete:
"You could walk from St. Stephen's, have lunch at Jack Allen's, cross the Westlake Drive Bridge, go to Davenport Village."
That last stop, Davenport Village, is the other half of this story. The open-air shopping center at 3801 North Capital of Texas Highway has spent the same eighteen months quietly remaking itself, and the timing is not incidental. Its owner, Whitestone REIT, announced in March 2025 that it had signed four new tenants specifically chosen to serve, in the company's own words, the upscale neighborhoods the center sits among: Davenport Ranch, Westlake, Rob Roy, and Barton Creek. Westwood, part of the broader Westlake area named in that announcement, sits well within that catchment.
Here's how the two timelines actually stack up:
| What changed | When it happened |
|---|---|
| Whitestone REIT announces Davenport Village retail overhaul | March 2025 |
| Pvolve studio opens | Spring 2025 |
| Westlake Drive bridge opens, 20 days early | August 1, 2025 |
| Starbucks Reserve opens | Summer 2025 |
| Cedar Street bridge opens | Late 2025 |
| CUBExec executive suites open, connected to RVE Fitness | Q1 2026 |
| Loop 360 construction moves north to Courtyard Drive/RM 2222 | April 2026 |
Read top to bottom, it's two projects. Read left to right against the calendar, it's one story: the road got easier to use at almost the same moment the destination at the end of it got more worth using.
What actually opened at Davenport Village
Starbucks Reserve is the tenant getting the most attention, and for good reason. It's not a standard drive-through location. The 3,274 square foot store is one of Starbucks' Reserve concept locations, built around small-batch, high-end coffee served by baristas trained specifically in that line, with murals from Austin-based artists on the walls. It's the kind of stop that turns a coffee run into a fifteen-minute pause rather than a drive-through transaction.
Pvolve, a low-impact fitness studio that pairs resistance equipment with functional movement work, filled a 3,126 square foot space by spring 2025. RVE Fitness, a 7,815 square foot members-only gym, actually opened at Davenport Village back in February 2023, well before this current round of changes, though it was folded into the same announcement as the center's anchor fitness tenant. CUBExec rounded things out with private executive suites connected to the RVE space, aimed at the West Austin professionals who'd rather not commute downtown for a meeting room.
Whitestone's own numbers on the trade area help explain why these particular brands agreed to move in: the average household within three miles of Davenport Village carries an income above $247,000, and average home values in that radius top $1.28 million. Coffee and fitness are the two categories retail developers call daily traffic drivers, the kind of stop people make on the way to somewhere else rather than a destination in its own right. Whitestone's stated goal was to turn Davenport Village into what the company called an eighteen hour hub, busy from early coffee runs through evening workouts, instead of a center that emptied out by six.
What this actually changes about the daily loop
If you live in Westwood, the practical version of all this is simple. The two Loop 360 intersections you drove through most often on the way north are done, or close enough that the disruption phase has passed. The next round of construction pain is happening several miles further up the corridor, at Courtyard Drive and RM 2222, not on your regular route. And the shopping center that used to be a pass-through on the way to somewhere better now has a coffee shop worth the stop, a fitness studio in the same lot, and enough foot traffic during the day that it functions less like a strip center and more like an actual gathering point.
None of that shows up if you only track one half of the story. The road felt like an inconvenience for three years because that's what construction feels like while it's happening. What it was actually building, according to the agency doing the work, was a corridor where the walk from a lunch spot to a coffee shop to a trailhead near the Pennybacker Bridge is possible without getting back in a car. Whether that vision is fully realized yet or still a few phases away, the retail side of the equation has already caught up.
Neighboring pockets along the same stretch, from Rob Roy to Rollingwood to West Lake Hills, share this corridor and will likely notice the same shift as Davenport Village settles into its new mix and the Courtyard Drive work ramps up further north.
If you're weighing what a home in this stretch of Westlake is actually worth once a major road project clears and a shopping center reinvents itself around new anchor tenants, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Jenny Walker and the team at Lux Austin Real Estate track block by block. Reach out for a Home Valuation & Westlake Guide, and get the version of this market that accounts for what actually changed this year, not just what the comps say.
