What's New in Lake Highlands This Summer: A Field Guide for People Who Already Live Here

If you have lived in Lake Highlands for more than a few years, you have watched Skillman Street try to become a main street and mostly fail. The Town Center broke ground in 2007 and then sat. A Sprouts opened. An apartment block or two went up. For a long stretch, the neighborhood's daily life happened at the edges rather than the center.

Summer 2026 is when that finally shifts. The interesting Lake Highlands news this year is not a single opening or a single project. It is that three of them, a new Latin market at Kingsley Square, a townhome ground-break inside the Town Center footprint, and the continued refinement of the neighborhood's longtime anchor restaurants, all sit within a two-mile stretch of Skillman between Walnut Hill and LBJ. Read together, they describe a corridor that is thickening rather than expanding.

The Skillman corridor, read as a whole

The easiest way to see what changed is to trace a line down Skillman.

At the north end of the useful stretch, near the intersection with Walnut Hill, is Kingsley Square. That is where UniMarket Latin Foods opened in January 2026, the first U.S. location for brothers Richard and Esyneder Ospina, who also operate three stores in Calgary, in a 2,000-square-foot space that formerly housed a Palm Beach Tan. A mile south, still on Skillman, is the Lake Highlands Town Center, anchored by the Sprouts at 7110 Skillman and now the site where Mattamy Homes broke ground on Lake Highlands Village in March 2026, a gated community of 85 three-story townhomes at roughly 2,000 square feet each, with private garages, a central park, dog park and walking trails. And braided through the rest of the corridor are the restaurants that were already here: MoMo Italian Kitchen, Goldie's, Lochland's, El Vecino, Lounge Here, Cedar & Vine, Ghost Pizza, Strouderosa BBQ.

The corridor thesis matters because it changes how a resident actually spends a Saturday. The trip that used to end at Sprouts now has three or four reasons to keep going.

UniMarket is the more interesting opening, and here is why

A new grocery in Lake Highlands is not remarkable on its own. UniMarket is, because of how it is built.

Inside the old tanning-salon footprint, the Ospinas built a hot food counter, a 500-item market and a cafe with its own coffee roaster. The kitchen turns out grilled chicken and quesabirria tacos at $16.50 alongside lomo saltado, a Peruvian stir-fry of beef with red onions and tomatoes in a soy-based sauce, also $16.50. The Dallas Observer counted the inventory at around 650 items from across Latin America. The owners have applied for a beer and wine permit and plan monthly prix-fixe dinners.

That is four businesses in one lease. The reason it belongs in this piece rather than a restaurant column is what it says about the block. Kingsley Square has been an in-between center for a long time. A concept with this much programmed density does not go into an in-between center. It goes into a corridor its operators expect to be dense two years from now.

The dinner map, updated

The restaurant list residents already know has quietly refined itself. If you have not been paying attention, here is where the anchors sit today.

MoMo Italian Kitchen. The 40-year Lake Highlands original. Aaron Gross and Wende Stevenson took over in 2017, and Chef Asher Stevens's mandilli de seta, thick ribbons of handkerchief pasta with pesto, is now a permanent fixture after regulars pushed it onto the standing menu. The wine list has been reworked around smaller Italian producers.

Goldie's. The current darling. Reviewers on Yelp describe it as a discovery from last fall that has quickly become their default. New American with a full cocktail program.

Vector Brewing + Pizza + Coffee. Doubles as a community room. The 2nd Annual Board Break-a-Thon Fundraiser ran there on March 29, 2026, which tells you what kind of neighborhood building it is.

Lounge Here, Lochland's, El Vecino, Cedar & Vine, Ghost Pizza, Strouderosa BBQ. The rest of the bench, and the reason the neighborhood does not need to import a hospitality group to have a full week's worth of dinners.

The point of the list is not the ranking. It is that the corridor now has enough range that the honest answer to "where should we go tonight" no longer requires driving to Lower Greenville.

The Town Center is not the same project it was

If you moved to Lake Highlands before 2020, your mental model of the Town Center is probably still the one that made residents cynical. That model is out of date.

The public build-out was always ambitious. The regional planning organization describes it as a 70-acre mixed-use, walkable district built near the DART Blue Line's Lake Highlands Station, planned for more than 300,000 square feet of office and retail and 1,200 residential units, with a 20-acre Watercrest Park that includes a jogging trail, a lake and an outdoor amphitheater, and a pedestrian promenade called Wildcat Way. On paper, that has been true for close to two decades. In practice, the project started in 2007 and moved slowly, with a single 200-unit apartment block the only completed piece for years, after more than $86 million in infrastructure spending that included $10 million from DART for the light rail station.

The recent Mattamy announcement is what makes the district feel different in 2026 rather than 2016. The residential mix now includes the David Weekley Enclave homes with the Bungalow Series marketing walking distance to Sprouts, the Lake Highlands DART station across the street, and access to White Rock Creek and White Rock Lake trails, on top of the existing apartments and the 85 new Mattamy townhomes. When a national homebuilder puts a June 2027 sales launch and September 2027 closings on the calendar for a location, they are betting on the retail mix around it. That is a data point worth more than a press release.

The clearest signal that Lake Highlands Town Center has crossed a threshold is not what has been built inside it. It is that a builder like Mattamy is willing to price a townhome against the amenities that are still under construction.

A resident's summer Saturday, mapped

If you want to feel the corridor change without reading a planning document, spend one Saturday inside it. A version that uses only what opened or refreshed in the last twelve months:

1. Coffee and pastries at UniMarket's cafe on Skillman, using the house-roasted beans as the excuse.
2. A slow lap of the Sprouts anchor at 7110 Skillman and a walk through the Wildcat Way promenade to see which retail bays are papered over versus opening.
3. A run or a bike ride on the White Rock Lake trail. If it is the right weekend, the Celebration White Rock 5K and 10K starts just south of Winfrey Point at 950 E. Lawther and turns around at the Dreyfus Club. It is the largest annual fundraiser for the White Rock Lake Conservancy, and this year's proceeds go to a new playground and improvements in White Rock Lake Park. Packet pickup runs at White Rock Alehouse and Playtri the week before.
4. Lunch at Vector Brewing, or a slice at Ghost Pizza if the beer garden is packed.
5. A stop at the Bath House Cultural Center for its first annual White Rock Eagle Fest, the celebration of the resident bald eagles, Nick and Nora.
6. Dinner at MoMo, and the mandilli de seta.

This is a walkable, drivable, transit-connected version of a day that did not exist as one continuous route five years ago.

What to watch, and what the corridor still lacks

The corridor is thickening. It is not finished.

The retail mix inside the Town Center is still light for a district of its ambition. The plan for the eight-acre retail center calls for a 30,000-square-foot main building and four smaller pads ranging from about 5,000 to 10,000 square feet. Which national tenants land in those pads will determine whether the district reads as neighborhood-serving or as a regional draw. There is a meaningful difference in what that does to Skillman traffic.

The other thing to watch is where the momentum stops. Kingsley Square at Walnut Hill and the Town Center at the DART station now feel connected. The stretch between them still has older strip centers with high vacancy. That is the next mile of the story, and the corridor's builders are quietly betting that it fills in.

For a resident, the practical read is this. The Lake Highlands you moved to for the schools, the trails and the yards is still that neighborhood. The one you get to walk to on a Saturday is a different one than it was in 2020, and it is different enough that the reflex to drive somewhere else for dinner or coffee is worth breaking.

If you are thinking about how any of this shifts what your own home is worth, or what a move within the neighborhood would look like, Marla Sewall is happy to talk through it. Call or email to schedule a personal consultation about your home.