Gladwyne This Summer: A Village in Motion, and Where Residents Are Landing in the Meantime

If you live in the 19035, the practical map of your two-block village is being redrawn this summer. Not the streets, not the historic register footprint, not the century-old massing along Youngs Ford and Righters Mill. The buildings themselves are staying. What is moving is which tenant lives in which building, and the January version of that answer is not the July version.

That is the story worth tracking, because it changes the small daily rhythms that make Gladwyne feel like Gladwyne. Where you pick up a prescription, where you get a sandwich after Rolling Hill, which storefront has the wraparound porch. The Haldon House team, backed by Janine and Jeff Yass, unveiled a sweeping plan in January and then quietly rewrote large pieces of it in May after residents pushed back. Here is what that means for the walk between the library and the pharmacy right now, and what to watch through fall.

The village map is being redrawn, quietly

On Jan. 8, Andre Golsorkhi, founder and CEO of design firm Haldon House, presented plans for a revitalized town center, complete with historic architecture, green spaces, and businesses that "fit the character" of the area, revealing the project was backed by Jeff Yass, Pennsylvania's richest man, and his wife, Janine. The group has spent more than $15 million acquiring several prominent properties, including the former Gladwyne Market building for $5 million, the Village Shoppes and the post office property, and has also leased the former OMG Salon at 351 Righters Mill Road.

Four months of feedback later, the plan looks different. After months of community feedback, the redevelopment team is floating a revised plan that keeps more of the village's "quirk," shifts tenants around, reduces retail square footage, rejiggers a new village green and parking lot, which got its first public airing at the May 18 meeting of the Gladwyne Civic Association.

Here is the substantive shuffle residents should have in their heads before the next fence goes up:

The rewrite matters. The updated plan includes relocating Gladwyne Pharmacy into the former Gladwyne Market building and opening a restaurant in the former OMG Salon space. The new pharmacy digs would give the longtime village anchor a folksy wraparound porch and plenty of room for its extensive gift, children's items, home goods and, possibly, easier access to a new parking lot across the street. The architecture for the new building on the current pharmacy site will be a "celebration of old and new" inspired by the farms of Lower Merion and Lancaster County; in its first iteration, the Homeroom building would have mimicked the historic buildings around it, but designer Autumn Oser told the crowd they did not want to design a barn that looks like it has been there forever and try to create a false history.

Translation for someone who actually lives here: the pharmacy is not disappearing, it is inheriting the porch. The restaurant everyone was picturing in the old Market is now going into the salon building next door. And the new construction on the current pharmacy site will look new on purpose.

"Thanks for the conversations and feedback these past months. They've shaped a thoughtful evolution of our plan." — statement posted to the project's website by the Yasses

Homeroom is the anchor while the rest moves

While the pharmacy and restaurant plans keep evolving, the one piece of the village that is fully open and fully humming this summer is Homeroom. It is worth understanding what it actually is, because "new café in a small town" does not do it justice.

A veteran of Philadelphia's CookNSolo restaurant group and a Lower Merion native, Chef Morgan returns to his roots with the opening of his first café in the heart of Gladwyne Village, offering seasonally-driven breakfast and lunch menus that highlight local farmers and purveyors such as Urban Roots Philly, Kneehigh Farm, Bart's Bagels, Merzbacher's of Germantown and Ox Coffee. Homeroom is located in the space that was once Green Bean Coffee, where Morgan worked over a decade ago, and it is the exact spot where he discovered his passion for hospitality.

The CookNSolo lineage is the detail that reframes the café. That is the group behind Zahav, Laser Wolf and K'Far. Bart's bagels and Ox coffee are not decorative name drops on a menu board. They are the same suppliers you would find on much more expensive Center City counters, dropped into a two-block village that has, until recently, treated the Old Guard House across the county line as its default nice dinner.

There is also a practical wrinkle worth knowing. Golsorkhi suggested that Homeroom could temporarily relocate to the future restaurant building during construction. If you notice a shuffle inside Homeroom's current storefront later this year, that is why.

A walking loop that still works this August

Construction has not swallowed the village. The everyday loop residents already know is intact this summer, with a few extra beats worth stringing together on a weekend morning:

• Coffee and eggs at Homeroom, then west across Righters Mill.
• A short walk past the Gladwyne Free Library and the current pharmacy, both open and unchanged in day-to-day operation.
• Down Youngs Ford far enough to see the boarded former Market with renovations underway inside.
• Loop back through the Village Shoppes and note the OMG Salon building on Righters Mill, which is where the future restaurant is now headed.

Its two tiny blocks boast businesses and amenities like a grocery store, market, coffee shop, pharmacy, bank, library, gas station, post office, dry cleaner, hardware store, veterinary hospital, salon, pet groomer, yoga studio, art gallery, interior designer, and smart-home technology provider, and the postmaster and shopkeepers pride themselves on providing first-rate service to, and being on a first-name basis with, their customers. Almost nothing on that list has actually gone away. The redevelopment is a reshuffling of a few key nouns inside an inventory that was already denser than most Main Line residents realize.

When the crossroads gets loud, the trails don't

Two spaces absorb the rest of a Gladwyne summer, and neither is affected by the village plans.

Rolling Hill Park sits at 1301 Rose Glen Road. It is a nature park with hiking and equestrian trails on 103.0 acres. The Rolling Hills Creek Trail is the one to know. It meanders through broad meadows and deep woodlands, past the remains of numerous sizable stone structures that provided housing for mill workers before the turn of the 19th century, and the ruins are fascinating historical sites, though you should avoid going too close to them because the eroding rocks could be dangerous. The mill ruins pull directly from the same Mill Creek industrial history that produced the village itself. Directly below the village is Mill Creek, where the riverbank ruins of colonial mills still stand, and the village district and creek district are both on the National Register of Historic Places.

A few minutes northwest, Riverbend Environmental Education Center sits at 1950 Spring Mill Road. Riverbend sits on a 30-acre preserve in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. Open and free to the public from dawn to dusk every day of the year, Riverbend invites visitors to walk the trails and explore the grounds, and in addition to the trails, the preserve boasts meadow, woodland, stream and pond habitats. If you have kids in a camp week here, Riverbend Preserve camp dates run June 8th through September 4th, 2026, Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM to 3:30 PM with extended care offered in the morning and afternoon. The last three weeks of the season overlap with the tail end of the village's quiet August rhythm before school and civic calendars kick back in.

What to watch between now and the tree lighting

Three items are on the near horizon that will actually change the feel of the village.

First, the parking lot fight. Ron Weiner and Jane Stringer, who live in an adjoining Youngs Ford Place townhome, pleaded with the team to rethink the new tree-buffered parking lot, saying they would lose the views, privacy and residential feel they've enjoyed for decades, and another Youngs Ford neighbor, Rosemarie Leddy, questioned whether the proposed lot could fit enough cars for Homeroom, the restaurant, the village green and pharmacy. In order to turn the lot into parking, the developers would need an amendment to the zoning code, which would have to be approved by the board of commissioners.

Second, the wires. Golsorkhi said the team has received cost estimates for burying the unsightly overhead utility wires, though that piece is currently "on the shelf" while other planning continues. A yes on that changes every photograph you have ever taken of the crossroads.

Third, further up Waverly Road, an unrelated but significant reshaping. Retirement community Waverly Heights is seeking to demolish seven semi-attached single-family villas and put three buildings in their place, with two identical three-story buildings each housing 12 units, and a third adding 12 units onto the Blair Apartment Building, with plans also calling for additional parking spaces.

The civic calendar picks the season back up before you know it. The Gladwyne Civic Association's modest annual dues support civic efforts and signature events like Cleanup Day, the Memorial Day Parade, the Tree and Menorah Lighting, and the Annual Meeting. The tree lighting is the moment when the reshuffled village will feel most different, because by December the pharmacy porch or the salon-building restaurant may already be signaling their next chapter from the same corner.

If you are a Gladwyne homeowner watching the village shift and wondering what any of it means for the value of the house you already own, that is a conversation the team at Main Line Fine Homes has every week. Request a Free Home Valuation or Private Consultation and get a data-informed read on your specific block, from a team that has been walking these two blocks for decades.