Hobby Lobby Left Beechnut and 610 in 2022. It's Coming Back This Month, Just a Few Boxes Over.

Drive along South Braeswood toward the South Loop this week and you'll see fencing going up around the old Palais Royal shell at Meyerland Plaza, the anchor space that has sat empty since the department store chain shut down in 2020. That fencing isn't for another closure. According to permit filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, it marks the start of a $3.5 million buildout that will turn the 69,134-square-foot box into a new Hobby Lobby, with construction slated to run from this month through March 2027.

Here's the part that makes it worth a second look if you actually live near this corner instead of just passing through it. Hobby Lobby isn't new to this stretch of Beechnut and 610. The chain closed a store along that same corridor near Lowe's Home Improvement a few years back, and Academy Sports + Outdoors moved into that vacated box in November 2022. So the brand didn't leave the trade area when it closed that location. It's returning to the same half-mile of retail it exited, just landing in a different shell a few boxes down. If you shop this corner regularly, that distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it says something about how this whole plaza actually operates.

What's Actually Filed With the State

Permit records are a better read on what's really happening at Meyerland Plaza than any grand-opening banner, because banners go up after the decision is already made. The state filings tell you what's coming before the plywood does.

Two projects are moving through TDLR right now. The Hobby Lobby buildout in the former Palais Royal box carries that $3.5 million price tag and the August 2026 to March 2027 timeline. A second filing from March 2026 shows HomeGoods taking a 33,689-square-foot space between Nordstrom Rack and Office Depot, at an estimated $1.7 million. Neither of these is speculative leasing talk. Both are documented construction filings with dates, addresses, and dollar figures attached, the kind of paper trail that exists because someone has already signed something.

The Pattern Hiding Behind Every New Sign

Meyerland Plaza has effectively become a machine for recycling department-store boxes into off-price retail, and the landlord, Fidelis Realty Partners, has been running that machine for years now. Look at what's actually moved into what:

Every one of these is a national off-price or discount chain filling a shell that a full-price department store abandoned. That's not a coincidence and it's not really a comeback story either. It's a landlord with a one-million-square-foot center systematically re-slicing oversized 1990s-era anchor boxes into footprints that work for the retailers actually expanding in 2026, which right now means off-price apparel, home goods, sporting goods, and craft retail rather than the department stores this plaza was originally built around.

That's the thing worth sitting with if you live off South Braeswood and treat this plaza as your default Target run or your Saturday errand loop. A vacant anchor box here doesn't signal the center losing relevance. It signals a landlord waiting for the right tenant to sign a lease at the size that particular shell has been cut down to. The Joann Fabrics space closing in 2025 and already having a deal in the works by the time it went dark is the clearest evidence of that. Nobody let that box sit and hope. Fidelis was working the replacement before the closing sign went up.

Across the Freeway, a Different Kind of Backfill

None of this is happening in isolation. Directly across West Loop South from Meyerland Plaza, developer Capital Retail Properties has been building out a five-acre project called Meyerland Crossing on a stretch of land that had been sitting as surface parking. The site plan calls for a main building with space for four tenants and three smaller standalone buildings fronting the Loop, with the largest single building running about 20,500 square feet.

Two tenants are already confirmed for Meyerland Crossing: Chipotle and a Veterinary Emergency Group. The project sits just south of the existing Lowe's Home Improvement warehouse and near Plucker's Wing Bar, which had already opened along the same stretch of West Loop South. Academy Sports, still occupying that old Hobby Lobby box from 2022, sits nearby as well.

So the corner isn't just recycling boxes inside the existing plaza. It's adding entirely new construction across the street, aimed at a mix of fast-casual dining and service businesses rather than more big-box retail. For a household on South Braeswood, that means the driving distance to a Chipotle or an emergency vet visit is about to get shorter, not because either business chose this location at random, but because a developer identified an underused parking lot at one of the busiest hard corners in southwest Houston and decided it was worth building on.

Houston's open-air retail centers were running lean on vacancy heading into this stretch, too. Retail brokerage Weitzman put Houston-area open-air occupancy above 90 percent for most of the prior decade and at 95.4 percent as of mid-2024, a tight enough market that landlords chasing conversion-ready anchor boxes had real incentive to move fast once a department store vacated. That backdrop helps explain why Fidelis has been so aggressive about lining up replacements before boxes even go dark.

What This Means for Your Next Saturday Errand Run

If you live near this stretch of South Braeswood, here's the practical version of all this:

1. Expect visible construction fencing around the old Palais Royal box through early 2027, with the new Hobby Lobby opening some point after the March 2027 completion date on file.
2. The HomeGoods buildout between Nordstrom Rack and Office Depot is a separate, smaller project that could move faster given its March 2026 permit date, though no opening date has been confirmed publicly.
3. The old Joann Fabrics space is still without a named tenant as of the most recent public reporting, worth watching if you're the type who tracks these things on your regular loop through the plaza.
4. Across the Loop, look for Chipotle and the Veterinary Emergency Group to be among the first businesses open at Meyerland Crossing, with more tenants likely to be announced for the remaining spaces in that four-tenant main building.

None of this changes anything about whether South Braeswood is a good place to live. It's already established, already walkable to a shopping corridor most residents have used for decades. What it does change is the specific mix of what's there. The plaza your parents might remember as a struggling power center with empty department stores has spent the past several years turning those same boxes into a lineup of national discount and off-price retailers, one signed lease at a time, and the corner across the street is filling in behind it.

If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth, or thinking about what comes next for a property you already own here, that's a conversation grounded in specifics like these rather than general talk about "convenient shopping nearby." The S Group Houston works this side of Houston every day and can walk you through what a shifting retail corridor like this one actually means for your address. Work With Us.