The Same Team That Built Montrose Collective Is Now Working on Your Side of I-10

Drive past 1085 Gessner Road right now and you will see three renovated warehouse buildings, fresh stucco, an acre of open lawn framed by string lights, and almost no signage. That gap between what's visibly finished and what's still empty is the whole story of Greenside this fall, and it matters more than the press releases calling it a "2026 opening" would suggest.

Here is the detail that changes how you should read this project. Radom Capital, the firm behind M-K-T Heights, Montrose Collective, and Heights Mercantile, has never worked with MetroNational before. MetroNational owns Memorial City Mall and has for decades operated on a different playbook: big-box anchors, structured parking, indoor corridors. Greenside is the first time the developer who made those Inner Loop micro-districts walkable has been handed a site inside the Memorial City footprint. If you have walked Montrose Collective on a Saturday afternoon, or grabbed coffee at Heights Mercantile before a farmers market, you already know what that team's design instincts produce. The question worth asking is not whether Greenside will eventually look like those places. It's what part of it is actually real right now, because the timeline has already slipped once.

What Shell Construction Actually Means

When Radom and MetroNational first announced Greenside in December 2024, the plan called for construction to start in spring 2025 and tenants to open in spring 2026. That schedule moved. As of mid-June 2026, the developers confirmed that shell construction on the three buildings was complete and disclosed five additional tenants, but pushed the first tenant openings to the fourth quarter of the year. That is a three-to-six month gap between "the buildings are done" and "you can walk in and order something," which is a normal lag for retail buildout but one that gets lost in coverage that just says "opening 2026."

The tenant list, as confirmed through that June announcement, breaks into two waves:

None of these are open yet. All of them are in some stage of tenant buildout inside a shell that only became available to them in the last few months. If you are the kind of Memorial Villages resident who plans a weeknight route around what is actually walkable rather than what a rendering promises, the honest answer this September is: not yet, but the fourth quarter is when you start checking.

Why the Walkways Matter More Than the Ribbon Cutting

Greenside was never designed to stand alone. The plans call for new pedestrian connections between Gessner Road and Mathewson Lane, tying the new buildings directly into three restaurants that already exist and already work: Kirby Ice House, Mia's Table, and Torchy's Tacos. That detail is easy to skip past, but it means the project is being built as an extension of an established cluster rather than a competing destination that has to earn foot traffic from zero. For a resident, that is the practical upside of the delay. You are not waiting on an isolated development to prove itself. You are waiting on additions to a corner of Memorial City that already has a Friday night crowd.

Danna Diamond, the MetroNational vice president involved in the project, put the intent plainly when the June tenant list came out.

"Greenside is designed to be a place where people want to gather and enjoy thoughtfully crafted experiences."

That is standard developer language, but it lines up with what the walkway plan actually does on the ground: it turns a stretch of Gessner that used to be a driving corridor into something closer to a loop you could park once and cover on foot, from ice house to gelato counter to a play lawn built for kids to actually use.

The Other Multi-Year Project Underway a Few Minutes East

Greenside is not the only long-horizon build touching Memorial Villages residents' daily radius this year. Memorial Park Conservancy is currently developing Memorial Groves, a 100-acre commemorative landscape on the western end of the park designed by landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz. Memorial Groves is scheduled to open in phases between 2026 and 2028, honoring the soldiers of Camp Logan, the World War I training camp that occupied the site before the park existed. That means the two biggest physical changes near Memorial Villages this year, one commercial and one civic, are both partial and both multi-year. Neither will look finished by December.

What is finished, or at least dated and confirmed, is the park's fall calendar. The Bayou City Art Festival returns to Memorial Park October 9 through 11, 2026, and the Chord Energy Houston Corporate 5K runs October 20 through 22 for its tenth year, with more than 10,000 participants expected around the Seymour Lieberman Trail. Those two weekends are the closest thing to a settled plan you will get for fall programming in the park while Memorial Groves continues its phased build.

What This Actually Changes About Your Fall

If you live in one of the six Memorial Villages and treat CityCentre, Memorial City Mall, and Town and Country Village as your default rotation, the honest update is this: nothing new opens at Greenside before Q4 2026, and even that window is a target, not a guarantee, given the project's history of slipping. But the buildings are done, the tenant roster is now specific rather than speculative, and the design team building it has a track record inside the Loop worth knowing about before the ribbon cuttings start. Meanwhile, the park side of your neighborhood already has two dated events on the books for October, independent of whatever else is or isn't finished by then.

The version of this story that gets repeated on real estate sites treats "Greenside opens 2026" as a fact you can plan around today. It isn't yet. What you can plan around is a specific, confirmed tenant list, a construction milestone from June, and a fourth-quarter target that has already moved once. That gap between announcement and opening is the actual news here, and it is the difference between checking Gessner Road every few weeks out of habit and knowing which weekend to actually go looking for a table.

If you are weighing what a home near this corridor is worth once Greenside and Memorial Groves are both further along, or you are simply curious how projects like this tend to move Houston property values in practice, Albert Cantu has spent more than two decades tracking exactly this kind of shift across Houston's Inner Loop and surrounding submarkets. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what it means for your street specifically.