Drive Hickory Flat Highway past the intersection with Hickory Road right now and you will see six foundations poured on one side of the road and a two-story steel frame rising on the other. Nothing has a sign up yet. If you live in Harmony on the Lakes, the neighborhood tucked between Hickory Flat Highway and Hickory Road less than two miles from that corner, you have probably already wondered which of those buildings opens first and whether it matters.
It matters more than the announcement made it sound. The 100,000-square-foot development called Hickory Flat Marketplace, going up at 6375 Hickory Flat Highway, was never going to open as one ribbon-cutting event. The developer, D&G Development Group, said so directly when the project broke ground: certain buildings and spaces will be completed earlier than others. That single sentence is the whole story, because the order those buildings finish in tells you something the tenant list alone does not: what changes on your errand run this month versus what changes next spring.
The Split Nobody Puts On The Rendering
Hickory Flat Marketplace is not one building. It is two very different construction projects sharing a 14-acre parcel.
The front portion holds six buildings totaling 45,110 square feet, the kind of in-line, multi-tenant strip construction that goes up fast because each unit is a shell waiting for a tenant to finish the interior. This is where Chipotle Mexican Grill, Caribou Coffee, Chicken Salad Chick, Panda Express, Little Rosa's Pizza, Noire Nail Salon, WellStar Health System, Fifth Third Bank, Delta Community Credit Union, Reesha Barber Shop and Sans Age Studio are slated to land.
The back portion is a single building: a two-story, 65,000-square-foot OneLife Fitness location representing a $17 million investment, the company's 17th in Georgia. It is not a strip mall unit. The plans include an indoor saltwater pool, a hot tub, a cold plunge, a recovery suite, saunas, group fitness studios and a kids' club, the kind of build-out that takes considerably longer than a coffee counter and a drive-thru window. A separate parking pad next to the future OneLife location is still listed for sale, unbuilt.
Those two timelines do not run in parallel. Standalone pad buildings with their own utilities and their own drive-thru lanes tend to finish before interior units inside a shared six-building strip, and a two-story club with a pool and mechanical systems for saunas and cold plunges takes longer than either. If you are timing a first visit, the practical read is that Hickory Flat Marketplace's most-talked-about tenant, the anchor gym everyone mentions first, is also the one most likely to be among the last doors to open.
What's Already Open, A Few Hundred Yards Away
You do not have to wait for any of it to see the fast-casual demand playing out. Surcheros, the Tex-Mex counter chain, held a ribbon-cutting with the Cherokee Chamber of Commerce on February 4, 2026 at a corporate-owned location on Hickory Road, next to Bruster's Real Ice Cream and Dairy Queen. It sits on a different parcel from the Marketplace itself, part of a separate project called Hickory Flat Retail that includes two single-story buildings, one at 7,190 square feet with two tenant spaces and one at 5,920 square feet with room for four. That project moved fast enough to open its first tenant before the bigger Marketplace across the road had finished pouring foundations.
That sequencing is the pattern worth remembering as fall progresses: smaller, simpler, single-tenant construction clears first. The complicated stuff, especially anything with a pool or a second story, clears last.
What Actually Changes On A Tuesday
None of this replaces a trip you already make. It shortens the ones that currently require driving past your own neighborhood.
Right now, the closest reliable Chipotle or Panda Express from Harmony on the Lakes means a drive to Towne Lake or Riverstone. Once the in-line units at the Marketplace open, that stops being a fifteen-minute detour and becomes a stop on the way home, alongside Chicken Salad Chick and Little Rosa's Pizza on the same lot. Little Rosa's has its own local roots worth knowing: owner Joe Rosa is bringing his own version of a concept his father Tony Rosa started as Rosa's Pizza in Holly Springs back in 1984, before Joe stepped away from the original business in 2019 and later relaunched under the new name.
A WellStar location inside the corridor removes a common reason families currently drive to Canton or Woodstock for routine care. Fifth Third Bank and Delta Community Credit Union give the area two banking options it does not currently have without leaving the Hickory Flat Highway and Hickory Road triangle. And the fitness picture, once OneLife eventually opens, becomes genuinely different rather than just bigger: the corridor's current gym, Anytime Fitness at Hickory Flat Commons, serves the quick key-fob-in crowd well, but OneLife is a full-service club format arriving alongside Alloy Personal Training's small-group coached model. That is three distinct ways to work out inside one intersection where there used to be one.
What Doesn't Change
The triangle formed by GA-140, Hickory Road and East Cherokee Drive already holds the community's two grocery-anchored shopping centers, the Hickory Flat Public Library, and the Sequoyah High School educational complex that includes Hickory Flat Elementary and Dean Rusk Middle School. The new construction is filling in that existing footprint, not expanding into the subdivisions around it.
The independent kitchens that gave the corridor its character before any of this broke ground are not going anywhere either. Hickory Flat Kitchen, the upscale sit-down spot opened by co-owners Chris Taylor and Dan Vickery inside Hickory Flat Village, still ships in fresh produce several times a week and fresh proteins two to three times a week for a menu built around scratch cooking. Yelp's current local rankings still put names like Union Hill Grill, Old Country Place, Big Easy BBQ, 7 Acre BarnGrill, Bully Run, Mamma Onesta's Italian Restaurant and B & B Tavern Free Home at the top of the list, the same names that made up the corridor's dining options for years before a single Chipotle sign went up.
Growth arriving in this corridor is not new, and it has not always been simple. When plans surfaced years ago to demolish an older community building to make way for a Chick-fil-A, the Cherokee County Historical Society pushed to preserve it. The preservation effort did not succeed, and the restaurant that replaced it was built with a vintage-inspired interior, including a large gathering table made from reclaimed wood. Whatever a person makes of that particular trade, it is a reminder that this corridor has absorbed new construction before without losing its independent restaurants or its walkable center.
The Intersection Worth Watching At 5 P.M.
The one change that has nothing to do with what you can buy and everything to do with how you get home is traffic. More than 400 parking spaces at a single address, plus drive-thru lanes on the Hickory Road pad, will change turn-lane behavior at the intersection of GA-140 and Hickory Road, especially in the late afternoon window between 4 and 6 p.m. That is a straightforward function of stacking that many additional vehicles onto an intersection that residents have driven the same way for a decade. It is worth building into a Tuesday commute home from Harmony on the Lakes even before you have decided whether you are stopping.
The lake, the trails and the gazebo at the center of Harmony on the Lakes are not part of this story. What is changing sits two miles down the road, in pieces, on a schedule that favors the simpler buildings first. Knowing that order, rather than waiting for a single grand opening that was never coming, is the difference between checking the corridor once a week out of habit and knowing exactly which sign to watch for next.
If something changes on this corner that residents should know about before it hits the local news feed, that is the kind of update Broadus Realty Group tends to catch first. Send us a note if you want to be on the list.
