Downtown Buford Got One New Storefront This Year. The Highway Got Five.

"Buford marks the beginning of a new chapter for Living Spaces," said founder and CEO Grover Geiselman when the California furniture chain opened its doors on Gravel Springs Road this past June. He was talking about his own company's expansion, but the line fits the whole year in Buford better than he probably intended. Walk Main Street this September and you'll find the same wine bars, the same antique shop windows, the same unhurried Saturday crowd that has been there for years. The actual new chapter has been unfolding a few miles east, along Buford Highway and Buford Village Way, in buildings most residents pass on the way to the Mall of Georgia without registering as a destination.

Five businesses opened along that corridor this year. Downtown added one, and it took the better part of two years to get there. That gap isn't about which half of town people prefer. It comes down to what kind of building was sitting empty and waiting in each place.

What Actually Opened This Year

The corridor's new arrivals landed within a few months of each other, and each one moved into a space built for exactly what it became.

• Xochitl opened this spring at 33 Buford Village Way. Owner Susana Zarate runs the family-run Mexican restaurant with her siblings, her children, and a family friend, Ramon Ortega, in a room that seats around 180 people. The tamales on the menu are made by Zarate's mother and listed under her name, Aurelia's Tamales.
• Living Spaces opened June 26 at 2630 Gravel Springs Road, its first store anywhere on the East Coast and its 43rd location nationally. The showroom pairs curated collections from designers Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent with four model home displays and a sleep center.
• Bazaar International Market and Cafe held its grand opening August 8 after an earlier soft launch. Owner Prabesh Pandey built an 8,000 square foot store carrying Indian, Nepali, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, African, European, and Asian groceries, with a cafe serving coffee, juice, and gyros.
• Porterhouse Grill leased the former O'Charley's building directly in front of Macy's at the Mall of Georgia, roughly 7,500 square feet built out to seat around 300.
• Sierra, the outdoor gear retailer, and Homesense, which landed off I-85 and GA-20, rounded out the stretch without a plate of food between them.

Reviewers on Roadtrippers noted Xochitl moved into what had been "the old Maria's location," a small detail that says something about how these corridor spaces get recycled from one restaurant concept to the next rather than sitting vacant.

The One That Took Two Years

Downtown's lone 2026 addition is Chicks N Boba, a fried chicken and bubble tea concept that had been running as a pop-up around Buford since fall 2024. It built a following at local events before its owners started talking publicly about a permanent home at 1 West Main St, Suite 3, in the heart of the historic district. That's an established concept with real demand, and it still needed the better part of two years to go from a pop-up tent to a lease two blocks from where it started.

Downtown wasn't standing still this year either. The city finished a parking deck on Moreno Street that finally gave visitors somewhere to leave the car, a genuine improvement for anyone who has circled the block looking for street parking on a Friday night. But a parking deck is infrastructure, not a new storefront. The two projects tell different stories about what downtown can add quickly and what it can't.

Why the Shells Decide the Timeline

Every one of those corridor businesses moved into a space already sized, plumbed, and zoned for exactly what it became. Porterhouse Grill didn't have to build a kitchen from scratch. It took over a building that used to be a working restaurant, equipment and all. Bazaar International's owner described the buildout as already 95 to 96 percent complete before the store even cleared its final county review, because the shell had been sitting ready for a grocery-format tenant. Sierra and Living Spaces both leased into retail centers built for large-format turnover, the kind of suite sizes and utility hookups that make it possible to go from lease signing to grand opening in a matter of months.

Main Street doesn't have that kind of inventory. Its storefronts are small, historic, and limited in number, which is exactly what makes the district charming and exactly what caps how fast anything new can arrive there. A concept can spend a year building a following at farmers markets and food truck rallies, the way Chicks N Boba did, and still spend nearly as long again waiting for the right storefront to open up two doors down from where it started.

None of this is a knock on either half of town. It's a fact about the building stock each one is working with.

What This Means Depending on Which Half of Town You're In

If your daily errands run through the Mall of Georgia corridor, this has probably been an obvious year. A new grocery store carrying ingredients that used to require a longer drive, a steakhouse with 300 seats in a building that used to be something else, a furniture showroom the size of a small distribution hub. That kind of change is hard to miss.

If your routine keeps you closer to the square, the year has likely felt quieter, and that read isn't wrong either. One new storefront arrived downtown, a food concept residents had already been watching for two years before it finally got a lease. The parking deck on Moreno Street matters, but it doesn't show up the way a new restaurant does.

Both versions of Buford are growing. One is growing in large, fast increments because the buildings allow it. The other is growing in small, slow increments because its buildings don't. Main Street still fills up on a Saturday afternoon, and Xochitl's patio still faces the city's event lawn a few miles away. The difference isn't which one is winning. It's which one has room to move quickly right now.

If you've been keeping half an eye on what's changing in Buford because you live here and want to understand how the town is actually growing, that's worth paying attention to as more space opens up on both ends of the highway. Jacklyn Zuniga keeps a close watch on how North Georgia towns like Buford grow block by block, and would love to hear what you've noticed changing in your own corner of town. Let's Connect.