"We could not have found a better place to introduce an SLC community in Houston."
That's Tim Downey, founder and CEO of Southern Land Company, talking about a nearly two-acre corner at Kirby Drive and Kipling Street. If you live in River Oaks and drive that stretch of Kirby toward Westheimer, you've probably noticed the site. What you may not have clocked is that the tower rising there will end up taller than the much more talked-about hotel project going up on Buffalo Speedway. Everyone's been reading about the Auberge. The bigger structure is the one nobody's writing magazine features about yet.
Three separate developers are building three separate projects along the same run of Kirby Drive and Buffalo Speedway that traces River Oaks' southern edge, and none of them are coordinating with each other. They just happen to have all decided, within months of one another, that this corner of Houston is worth a combined investment north of $270 million. Here's what's actually going up, and why the one getting the least press coverage is the one that will end up standing tallest.
Three Developers, One Stretch of Road
Two of the three sites sit directly across Kirby Drive from each other. The third is a short drive away on Buffalo Speedway.
Project | Address | Developer | What's coming | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
The RO | West Alabama & Buffalo Speedway | Transwestern | 145,000-sq-ft office tower (occupied), The Birdsall hotel, The Clayton apartments, an eight-restaurant retail village | Office occupied since summer 2026. Everything else targeted for late 2027 |
Lily River Oaks / 2811 Kirby | 2811 Kirby Drive | Southern Land Company | 38-story apartment tower with 331 units and 18 penthouses, plus a 10-story office building | Broke ground April 2026, targeting 2028 completion |
The Shops at Arrive River Oaks | 2800 Kirby Drive | Owned and leased by Transwestern | Bussia Cucina Italiana, Cullen Jewelry, Kale Functional Medicine | Bussia buildout targets January 2027. Cullen Jewelry and Kale Functional Medicine leases are already signed |
None of these three are phases of the same master plan. Transwestern is building The RO from the ground up. Southern Land Company, a Nashville-based developer making its first move into Houston, is doing 2811 Kirby entirely on its own. And the retail leasing at 2800 Kirby is happening inside a building that's been standing for years, just filling in with new names.
The Office Tower That's Already Occupied
Of the three projects, The RO's first building is the one furthest along. The 145,000-square-foot office tower at West Alabama and Buffalo Speedway is fully leased to Vitol Inc., the Geneva-based energy trading company, and tenant occupancy was scheduled for June 2026. That date has already come and gone, so if you drive past this summer, the people you see walking in and out are already working there.
What makes that building worth pausing on isn't the tenant roster, it's the fact that it broke ground at all. Commercial brokers covering the deal have called it one of the very few office buildings to break ground inside Houston's Inner Loop in the past five years, a claim that lines up with how little new office space Houston has added anywhere close to downtown. When a landlord finishes a spec office tower in a market that quiet, they're betting tenants will pay a premium for a newer building in a better location rather than settle for older inventory. Vitol clearly agreed enough to sign before the building was even finished.
The Tower Betting Against the Market
Across the street from The Shops at Arrive River Oaks, Southern Land Company broke ground in April on a nearly two-acre corner at Kirby Drive and Kipling Street, the site Tim Downey was talking about. The Nashville-based developer, making its first move into Houston, is building a 38-story apartment tower called Lily River Oaks with 331 units, including 18 penthouses, paired with a 10-story office building. Completion is targeted for 2028.
The office component here is where the bet gets bold. Southern Land is targeting office rents starting at $55 per square foot triple net, against a citywide average of $30.57 in the first quarter of 2026. That's not a typo. It's a wager that proximity to River Oaks is worth nearly double the going rate. The project has also been described as one of only a handful to break ground inside Houston's Inner Loop in recent years, which puts 2811 Kirby in the same rare category as The RO's office tower, two separate developers making the same unusual call within months of each other.
The Restaurant You Can't Eat At Yet
Walk into The Shops at Arrive River Oaks today and you'll find Eddie V's Prime Seafood and Dr. Roth's SkinCeuticals SkinLab already open. What's changing is what fills the remaining storefronts. Cullen Jewelry, an Australian direct-to-consumer brand specializing in lab-grown diamond engagement rings, leased 2,716 square feet for its first U.S. showroom. Kale Functional Medicine is relocating its wellness practice from Westcott Street into a 3,262-square-foot suite. Both leases were part of a round of signings that pushed the center to 94 percent leased as of an October 2025 announcement from Transwestern.
The one still under construction is the one worth watching. Bussia Cucina Italiana, a new concept from Fabrizio Paletta, who also owns Pane e Vino in Katy, leased 3,590 square feet at the corner of West Avenue and Kipling, in a space that used to house a furniture retailer. Permit filings put the interior buildout at $400,000, with work starting around June 2026 and a completion target of mid-January 2027. If the timeline holds, that's roughly five more months of scaffolding before the doors open. There's a restaurant of the same name in Amsterdam, but nothing in the public filings connects the two, so don't assume the menu will look anything like it.
The Building Everyone's Writing About
The Birdsall is the reason this stretch of Houston has been showing up in Texas Monthly and PaperCity. It will be Houston's first Auberge Resorts Collection property, a 34-story tower designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox that pairs a 105-room hotel with 44 private residences. The building's exterior uses reclaimed Cedar Bayou brick, the same material found in many of River Oaks' original homes, and it's named for Birdsall Parmenas Briscoe, an architect whose fifty-year career helped shape early Houston. The residences were designed by Dillon Kyle, an architect known for his work inside River Oaks itself. None of this is subtle. The building is designed to look like it grew out of the neighborhood next door, even though it technically sits outside it.
The Birdsall anchors a larger second phase at The RO that also includes The Clayton, a 317-unit luxury apartment tower designed by Pickard Chilton, and an 80,000-square-foot retail village planned for up to eight restaurants beneath a set of heritage oak trees that predate the whole project. All three pieces are targeting delivery in late 2027, roughly sixteen months from now.
Here's the detail that gets buried under all that architectural pedigree: at 34 stories, The Birdsall is four stories shorter than Lily River Oaks, the apartment tower already under construction at 2811 Kirby. Between the two residential towers alone, the corridor is adding 648 new units, 331 at Lily River Oaks and 317 at The Clayton. The hotel gets the magazine spreads because it carries a brand name people recognize. The taller building just happens to be an apartment tower from a developer most Houstonians have never heard of.
Why It's All Happening at Once
None of these three developers needed to move this year. Houston's multifamily development pipeline hit its lowest level since 2011 in the first quarter of 2026, with only 638 new starts and an under-construction pipeline of roughly 12,000 units, most of it luxury product. Office construction has been just as scarce, with the citywide vacancy rate hovering around 27 percent in that same quarter, a number that has kept most landlords from breaking ground on anything speculative. That's exactly the kind of scarcity that makes a developer decide now is the moment to build, rather than wait for competitors to fill the gap first. Southern Land Company's chief investment officer has said the company is using the slower construction environment to position itself ahead of rising rents.
That's the mechanism behind what you're seeing on your daily drive. It's not one master-planned district with a single ribbon-cutting date. It's three developers independently reading the same scarcity signal and deciding to bet on the same stretch of Kirby Drive and Buffalo Speedway at nearly the same time. The Auberge name will keep getting the headlines because it's the flashiest signature on the corridor. But if you're trying to figure out which crane belongs to which building next time you're stopped at the light on Kirby, remember that the tallest one isn't the hotel.
If you're curious about how any of this shifts the character of the neighborhood you already call home, or what it means for property values along River Oaks' edge over the next few years, Nancy Almodovar has been tracking this market long enough to read past the press releases.
