Stand at the corner of Main Street and Elkhorn Drive this fall and you can watch two different kinds of construction happening within sight of each other. On one corner, crews are carefully restoring a building that has stood since 1897, keeping its bones intact while carving out two restaurant spaces inside. A block or two away, on Elkhorn Drive and 205th Street, entire buildings are rising from bare dirt, three stories at a stretch, with nothing old to preserve because nothing was there before.
Both count as "new" in Old Towne Elkhorn right now. They are not the same story, and the difference explains more about how this neighborhood is growing than any single opening ever could.
Inside the Historic Boundary, Growth Means Restoration
The building most people know as the old Bella Vida spot, on the corner of Main and Elkhorn Drive, is getting its second life this year. Chuck Olson, who already owns Main Street Cellars a block away, bought the 1897 structure and is turning it into two separate restaurants with two separate kitchens. Downstairs will be La Vida Nova. Upstairs, a still-unnamed fine dining spot plans to run a chef's tasting menu. When the project was announced last December, the timeline had La Vida Nova opening in May with the upstairs restaurant following a couple of months behind. If that held, both should be serving by now, or close to it.
That kind of project, a careful reuse of a building instead of a teardown, is the norm rather than the exception inside Old Towne Elkhorn's historic core. In January 2025, the four-block Elkhorn Commercial Historic District, the stretch of Main Street built up in the 1860s around the railroad, earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. As 3 News Now reported, the buildings in that district, an old bank, a former auto shop, storefronts that once served a farming and rail town, come with tax credits at the national and state level once an owner commits to restoring rather than replacing them. That is not a rule that forbids new construction inside the boundary. It is a financial nudge that makes fixing up a 130 year old building pencil out in a way that tearing it down and starting over usually does not.
So when a new business wants in on Main Street proper, the shape it takes is almost always the same: an old structure, a new tenant, a rehab budget instead of a foundation pour.
Step Outside the Boundary and the Growth Looks Completely Different
Walk a couple of blocks off Main and onto Elkhorn Drive, and the pattern flips. Elkhorn Landing, a two-building development just outside the historic district's edge, has gone up from scratch. Building One opened first, with offices on the ground floor, Foster's Mercantile occupying the main level, and six condos for rent plus one privately owned unit on the top two floors. Building Two followed close behind, built strictly commercial this time: Cedar Creek Coffee & Art opened there in January 2026 on the lower level, a specialty coffee shop and art gallery with a full stage that hosts live music, poetry readings, trivia nights, and coffee education sessions pulling from more than a dozen roasters around the country. Fluff Interior Design took the space upstairs. The builder of both buildings, Choice Homes, kept the top floor of Building Two for its own offices.
A few blocks over on 205th Street, a third new structure, The Nomad at the Olde Towne Grove, went up as an event and meeting space, another ground-up project on a lot that had nothing on it before.
None of this is happening inside the four blocks that just made the National Register. It is happening in the streets immediately around it, where a business owner or developer can build exactly the footprint they want without working around a century-old floor plan. Old Towne Elkhorn is not growing outward from Main Street so much as it is growing on both sides of a line that historic designation just made official.
The Ground Underneath Is Still Catching Up
Growth that fast in a compact old rail town eventually runs into infrastructure that was never sized for it. That is roughly what happened this spring near Elkhorn Landing, where a stormwater drain project turned into months of construction disruption for the businesses closest to it. Cedar Creek Coffee, only a few months into being open, found itself competing for foot traffic against a construction hole. Foster's Mercantile opened up its own side courtyard, moving exterior furniture out for sale, to give Cedar Creek some visibility while the project dragged on. M.W. Designs, another neighbor in the same stretch, felt the dip in walk-by customers too.
As of late May, the building owner overseeing the project expected the dirt-moving phase to wrap by the start of June, with concrete work to follow. By the time you are reading this in September, that phase should be well behind the neighborhood, with the construction fencing and detours from earlier this year mostly a memory rather than a daily obstacle.
It is a small, unglamorous detail, but it says something real about the pace of change here. A neighborhood does not get a new coffee shop, a new mercantile courtyard, two new restaurants, and a new event space in the same stretch of months without the pipes underneath eventually needing attention too.
What to Look For This Fall
For anyone who has not walked through in a while, here is a quick map of what is new or in progress across Old Towne Elkhorn right now:
- La Vida Nova and its unnamed upstairs neighbor — two restaurants inside the restored 1897 Bella Vida building at Main and Elkhorn Drive, both expected to be open or nearly there
- Cedar Creek Coffee & Art — multi-roaster coffee shop and gallery space with a performance stage, on the lower level of Elkhorn Landing Two
- Foster's Mercantile — ground floor of Elkhorn Landing One, now with an expanded courtyard for outdoor furniture and pop-up space
- Fluff Interior Design — upstairs from Cedar Creek in Elkhorn Landing Two
- The Nomad at the Olde Towne Grove — a new event and meeting space on 205th Street
Two very different construction stories, converging in the same handful of blocks, in the same year.
What This Actually Tells You
The headline version of this story, the one you have probably already seen elsewhere, is a list of new restaurants and coffee shops. The more useful version is that Old Towne Elkhorn now has two distinct growth patterns running at the same time in the same small area, one preserving what was already there and one building something that never existed before, and the seams between them, quite literally the ground under the sidewalks, are what you notice first when growth outpaces the infrastructure built for a much smaller town.
That is worth knowing if you already call Elkhorn home. It is the kind of detail that explains why a familiar corner suddenly looks different, and why the next one over might not change at all.
We follow these shifts closely at Black Tie Realty because we live and work in these same neighborhoods, not because we are trying to sell you on one. If you ever want to talk through what a place like Old Towne Elkhorn means for your own plans, whenever that day comes, let's begin.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
