Drive down Corbin Drive this week and the plywood is coming down in patches, not all at once. The building at the corner of the Post Road is still studs and Tyvek. A few hundred feet away, the one that will house Rhone and Hinoki already has its upper floors buttoned up. If you've been waiting for the day the whole district flips on, a single ribbon-cutting weekend you can circle on the calendar, stop waiting. That day was never part of the plan.
What's actually happening downtown is a staggered handoff, building by building, and the sequence itself tells you something about how this project was designed from the start.
Twenty Years Before Anyone Poured Concrete
David Genovese, the Baywater Properties CEO behind the seven-acre redevelopment, grew up in Darien. Baywater has described the project's roots as stretching back nearly twenty years, parcel by parcel, including land once tied to Steve Zangrillo's Darien Sport Shop, which still sits across from part of the construction today. That timeline matters here because a project assembled piece by piece over two decades was never going to open as one finished object. It was built the way it was assembled, in stages.
Phase one of the district wrapped by late 2023, according to Baywater's own account of the project's progress. That means some of what you already walk past on Corbin Drive isn't new construction anymore. It's already downtown.
Where Each Building Stood This Summer
Baywater posts its own construction log, and the entries from this summer describe a project with real separation between buildings that look finished and buildings that are still framed lumber. Here's the state of things as that log shows it:
| Building | What's Moving In | Status |
|---|---|---|
| One Market Street (office tower) | McKinsey & Co., Aon, Crestwood Advisors, Janney Montgomery Scott | Office building rising, with steel and infrastructure work still underway |
| Corner of Post Road and Corbin Drive | Millie's, Tatte, Framebridge, Darien Toy Box | Carpenters actively framing the upper floors |
| Between Penny Lane and the pedestrian walkway | Rhone, Hinoki | Upper floors being finished, further along than the corner building |
| Existing Corbin Drive storefronts | Barrett Bookstore, Everything is Rosey, Green & Tonic, Shoes N More, Helen Ainson | Already open, several since phase one closed out in 2023 |
Worth noticing: Darien Toy Box shows up twice, because it's relocating from its current spot on Corbin Drive into the new building at the corner rather than arriving as a new tenant. That's not incidental. Genovese has said publicly that the project was built to preserve room for existing local retailers alongside the new regional and New York names, and the toy store's move is one of the more concrete examples of that promise actually playing out rather than staying a talking point.
The Anchor Store That Got Smaller, Not Bigger
The most telling decision in the entire project sits above the parking garage across from the Darien Sport Shop, a spot Genovese himself has called the gateway to both the project and the town. That spot was originally planned as a roughly 15,000-square-foot anchor storefront, the kind of footprint that usually goes to a single big-name retailer. Baywater shrank it down to somewhere between 3,500 and 4,500 square feet instead, and split the freed-up square footage among three smaller tenants: StretchLab, a permanent home for LaSource after it ran as a pop-up at Darien Commons, and the Greenwich boutique OGGI 5.
Genovese explained the trade-off directly:
"We didn't think that the anchor tenant at the project... should be a big box store."
That single decision is why there's no marquee moment to build the opening around. A big-box anchor gives a project a natural finish line, since everyone waits for the same doors to open. Splitting that space into three smaller leases means three separate build-out timelines instead of one, and it's part of why the retail rollout downtown is arriving on its own uneven schedule rather than all at once.
Parking Changed Before Any Restaurant Did
If downtown has felt easier to park in lately, that's not a coincidence. The underground garage was reported at almost 90 percent complete as of construction updates in early 2025, and Baywater opened the above-ground garage on a temporary basis specifically to get construction workers' vehicles off Corbin Drive and Old Kings Highway South, freeing those curbside spaces for people actually shopping downtown.
In other words, the parking changes you can already feel arrived ahead of a single new restaurant seating a customer. That ordering isn't an accident either. Infrastructure has to work before the storefronts built on top of it can open, which is one more reason the retail and dining rollout trails behind what residents can already see and use.
The Leasing Pace Tells the Same Story
Office space and street-level retail in this project have been leasing on different clocks, and that gap shows up in the numbers. As of March 2025, Genovese put the main office building at about 72 percent pre-leased, with retail trailing slightly at 68 percent pre-leased and another 9 percent in active negotiation. By May 2025, Barings, one of the project's lenders, described the commercial space overall as nearly 80 percent pre-leased. Office tenants like McKinsey, which is relocating its growing Stamford office of 270 employees, sign one lease covering a large block of space. Retail fills up one storefront at a time, and each one needs its own build-out before it can open its doors, which is a slower and more visible process from the sidewalk.
Even the total apartment count has moved as the design finalized. Baywater's own figures put the district-wide total at 116 units, while a Hartford Business Journal report tied to the project's phase-two financing cited 112. Numbers like that shift slightly as floor plans get locked in during construction, and it's a small sign that this is still an active build, not a finished product waiting on paperwork. That financing itself is notable on its own terms: the $165 million package, arranged in 2024, included a $102 million Barings construction loan and another $63.3 million through Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy financing, which the lender called the largest C-PACE assessment closed in Connecticut at the time.
What to Actually Expect This Fall
Once the corridor between Corsica Wine Bar and Chopt is finished, Market Street has town approval to close off entirely for events, the kind of farmers markets and outdoor gatherings that turn a retail corridor into a place people linger rather than just pass through. That's a real addition to downtown's public life once it's built, not a private courtyard for tenants only.
For now, the honest picture is a district opening in overlapping waves rather than one weekend. Some storefronts have been open for years. Others are still studs. The office tower is leasing faster than street-level retail can physically build out. None of that is a delay in the sense of something going wrong. It's what a twenty-year assembly project, deliberately built without one single big anchor to rally around, looks like from the outside while it finishes.
If you've lived near downtown through all of it, that context is probably more useful than another "coming soon" list. And if watching a place like Darien evolve this closely, block by block, has you thinking about what that means for your own home's place in it, that's exactly the kind of hyper-local read the Ken Banks Team builds into everything we do for buyers, sellers, and neighbors alike.
