Walk down Righters Mill Road this month and the village looks half-finished, because it is. At 357 Righters Mill, scaffolding wraps the old Gladwyne Market building, the one that's been dark since it sold for $5 million last year. A few doors down at 351, the OMG Hair Salon sign still hangs over an empty storefront that closed around the same time. Homeroom is still serving coffee out of its original spot. The Gladwyne Pharmacy is still where it's always been. None of the four buildings at the center of this project has actually changed hands in the way most residents assume when they hear "redevelopment."
That gap between what's been announced and what's actually happening is the part worth understanding before another season of renderings and civic association meetings rolls through.
The January Reveal
The project surfaced publicly on January 8, when Andre Golsorkhi, founder of design firm Haldon House, stood in front of a packed auditorium at Gladwyne Elementary and confirmed what months of quiet property acquisitions had already suggested: billionaire Jeff Yass and his wife Janine were behind a plan to remake the village center at Youngs Ford and Righters Mill Roads. Golsorkhi and his wife, Haldon House design principal Autumn Oser, are both from the area. Golsorkhi went to Gladwyne Elementary and Harriton High School himself, and his first job was stocking shelves in the pharmacy's basement.
The couple's firm, working with the Yasses, had spent more than $15 million buying up the former Gladwyne Market, the Village Shoppes building that houses the pharmacy and Homeroom, the post office property, and a private home on the 900 block of Youngs Ford Road. They'd also signed a lease on the shuttered OMG Salon space. The initial pitch included boutique retail, an "upscale-yet-approachable" restaurant in the old Market building, new green space, and a stated goal of burying the overhead utility lines that string through town. No national chains, no new residential construction, nothing taller than the two stories already allowed under the village's zoning.
It read, on paper, like a wish list. A restaurant, real green space, hidden power lines: the kind of upgrade a lot of small downtowns get pitched and rarely receive. That's part of why it drew both applause and immediate skepticism. One resident, a developer who's lived in Gladwyne for seven years, called it "110% in favor" territory. Others circulated a petition asking Lower Merion Township to hold a public hearing before any one family could consolidate control of a historic commercial core. It picked up more than 40 signatures within the first few weeks.
Four Months of Feedback Made the Plan Smaller, Not Bigger
What happened next is the part that doesn't usually make it into the general coverage of this project: the plan got smaller.
At a May 18 meeting of the Gladwyne Civic Association, Golsorkhi and Oser presented a revised concept that scaled back the original scope. Fewer new buildings. More open green space. A restaurant that had originally been slated for the old Market building moved instead into the smaller OMG Salon space at 351 Righters Mill. Retail square footage came down. The utility undergrounding, while not abandoned, got parked "on the shelf" while the rest of the planning continued.
That's a specific kind of retreat. Most redevelopment stories move in the other direction, where community pushback trims a project at the edges but the core footprint holds. Here, the anchor use for the old Market building changed entirely, from restaurant to pharmacy, and the restaurant that residents had been asking about for months got reassigned to a smaller building across the street. Oser has said the team wants that restaurant to feel like it's "always been there," styled as a tribute to a building that once operated as a general store, rather than importing a Philadelphia concept wholesale.
What's Under Construction and What's Still a Concept
Four addresses anchor the current plan. As of the most recent reporting, only one of them has visible work happening on site.
- 357 Righters Mill Rd (the former Gladwyne Market): renovation is underway now, with plans to relocate and expand the Gladwyne Pharmacy into the space.
- 351 Righters Mill Rd (the former OMG Hair Salon): leased, not yet renovated, slated for the still-unnamed restaurant.
- 358 Righters Mill Rd (the current Pharmacy and Homeroom building): would be demolished and replaced with a new barn-style structure, with an expanded Homeroom on the ground floor and office space above.
- 946 Youngs Ford Rd (a private residence): proposed for demolition to create a parking lot, with a retaining wall and tree buffer planned for the neighboring properties.
The first item is physically happening. The other three are still concepts that haven't been formally submitted to Lower Merion Township. Greg Prichard, the township's historic preservation planner, has said the project will require meetings with multiple review boards before it reaches the board of commissioners for final approval, and that hasn't started yet. A traffic study, which several residents pushed for at the May meeting, was still described as "in the works" as of that presentation, with one specific caution raised: a study conducted between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when the village quiets down, wouldn't capture the real peak-hour congestion Gladwyne sees the rest of the year.
The One Piece That Still Needs a Vote
Most of what Haldon House wants to do here, it can do without asking anyone's permission. Gladwyne's downtown carries a "neighborhood center" zoning designation adopted in 2023, one that already permits small-scale commercial buildings, local retail, and renovations up to two stories. Refurbishing the Market building, leasing the OMG space, redesigning storefronts: all of that is allowed by right under the current code, according to Lower Merion's director for building and planning, Chris Leswing.
The parking lot is different. Turning a residential parcel at 946 Youngs Ford Road into parking requires a zoning amendment, which has to go through the board of commissioners. That's the one piece of this plan that isn't a foregone conclusion. It's also the piece drawing the sharpest neighbor objections, since the lot would sit next to a single-family home and a townhouse development, and it's the clearest point where public input could still reshape the outcome rather than just react to it.
Gladwyne's only full-service dining option right now is the Guard House, operated by the Union League, and it's been closed to public diners for nearly a decade. That's the vacancy this whole project is really trying to fill, and it's also why the restaurant relocation from the Market building to the OMG space matters more than it might look on a site plan. It's a smaller building with less room, on a corner with less visibility, and no operator or opening date has been named.
What This Means for Your Next Walk Through the Village
If you're picturing a finished village green with a new restaurant humming by next spring, the timeline doesn't support that yet. What you can expect through the rest of this year is more scaffolding at the old Market building as the pharmacy build-out continues, no visible change yet at the OMG space or the current Homeroom building, and a parking lot proposal that still has to clear a zoning vote before it's real. The renderings that circulated in January and got revised again in May are concept drawings, not permitted plans, and the traffic study that's supposed to inform the final version hadn't been shared publicly as of the last civic association update.
The version of Gladwyne Village that actually gets built will likely look different from both the January reveal and the May revision, shaped by whatever the traffic study finds and whatever the board of commissioners decides about that parking lot on Youngs Ford Road. For now, the honest answer to "what's changing in the village" is: less than the renderings suggest, and not yet the parts most people are asking about.
If you're weighing a move to Gladwyne, or thinking about what a changing village center means for a property you already own here, Societe Select can walk you through what's actually locked in versus still on the drawing board before you make a decision tied to it.
