Drive past 3801 North Capital of Texas Highway and you'll see a shopping center that has been "transforming" since at least March 2025. Whitestone REIT, the Houston company that owns Davenport Village, put out a press release that month promising an "18-hour activity hub" for the neighborhoods that ring it: Davenport Ranch, Westlake, Rob Roy, and Barton Creek. Four tenants got named as the engine of that transformation. Three of them were genuinely new. The fourth had already been open for two years.
If you live in West Lake Hills and have wondered why the same gym keeps getting introduced to you, you're not imagining it. The story of what's actually changed at your neighborhood shopping center is smaller and more interesting than the press release version, and it's worth sorting out before you plan your next week around it.
The timeline, sorted out
Here's what actually happened, in order:
- February 2023 — RVE Fitness opens in the space formerly occupied by Castle Hill Fitness, next door to Maudie's Tex-Mex. It's a 7,815-square-foot gym with a pool, sauna, jacuzzi, and spin room, owned by Carlos Martorell alongside partners Esteban Sandoval and Adam Mata, with Martorell's wife Marisel running day-to-day operations.
- March 2025 — Whitestone REIT announces a "strategic transformation" of Davenport Village, naming Starbucks Reserve, Pvolve, RVE Fitness, and CUBExec as the four businesses driving it.
- Spring 2025 — Pvolve, the low-impact resistance studio, opens its 3,126-square-foot space.
- Summer 2025 — Starbucks Reserve opens its 3,274-square-foot location, the chain's premium coffee-bar format with locally commissioned artwork on the walls.
- First quarter 2026 — CUBExec's private office suites, connected to RVE Fitness, become available to rent.
- Spring 2026 — Taqueria de Diez opens its third Austin-area location inside Davenport Village, following an original downtown spot that opened in 2024.
Laid out that way, the pattern is obvious. Three of the four "transformation" tenants opened within the past eighteen months. The fourth has been renting checks to sweat in since before most of the transformation was even announced.
What's actually new this year
If you're deciding where to spend a Saturday morning, the businesses worth your attention are the ones that genuinely just arrived.
Taqueria de Diez is the clearest addition. It runs an open kitchen where you can watch tacos, burritos, and quesadillas get built to order, the same format that made its downtown location a regular stop after it opened there in 2024. Having a third location land inside Davenport Village means West Lake Hills residents no longer have to drive downtown for it.
Starbucks Reserve is the other real change, and it's a different animal from the drive-through Starbucks most people know. The Reserve format is built around barista technique and small-batch coffee, with the Davenport location featuring murals from Austin-based artists rather than the standard corporate design package. If your coffee routine has been Village at Westlake or a drive-through on Bee Caves Road, this is a legitimately new option, not a rebrand of something that already existed.
CUBExec is worth knowing about even if you're not shopping for office space personally. Private executive suites connected to RVE Fitness give West Austin's remote and hybrid professionals a place to take calls and hold small meetings without commuting downtown, a shift in how the center serves the neighborhood's workday rather than just its evenings and weekends.
The one that isn't
RVE Fitness is a good gym. New cardio equipment, a full class schedule that includes aqua aerobics and cardio kickboxing, a pool and hot tub for recovery. None of that is in question.
What's worth knowing is that none of it is new. The gym had its soft opening on February 6, 2023, more than two years before Whitestone's press release listed it as one of the four businesses "transforming" the center. If you've been meaning to check it out because you saw it mentioned as a recent addition, you've had three and a half years to get around to it. That's not a criticism of the gym. It's a reminder that landlord marketing and neighborhood reality run on different clocks, and the second one is the one that actually affects your week.
The part of the neighborhood that doesn't do press releases
A mile north of Bee Caves Road, off Loop 360, sits Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve. It has never issued a transformation announcement, and it doesn't need to. The preserve was established in 1974, when a group of West Lake Hills residents, including Janet Poage, Margaret Hessin, Lucille Stegman, Flora McCormick, Florence Macklin, Martha Hudson, and Willa Mae Hardesty, negotiated a deal that set aside more than 100 acres of a planned residential development to protect the sensitive Hill Country habitat along Bee Creek. Poage worked alongside Westview Development executive Beth Robertson, then-Mayor Carol McClellan, and County Commissioner Ann Richards to redraw the master plan of what was originally a 1,300-acre subdivision. In exchange for the donated land, the city allowed the developer to relocate the residential units elsewhere on the property.
Fifty-two years later, the preserve still holds 227 acres and 2.5 miles of trails through oak-juniper woodland and streamside habitat, with a waterfall on Bee Creek that runs seasonally depending on rainfall. Weekday visits are free and the trails stay open sunrise to sunset. Weekend visits require an online reservation and a five-dollar parking fee, a system the preserve uses to manage crowding rather than to generate revenue. Dogs aren't allowed, since it's an active habitat for species including the golden-cheeked warbler, and bikes and picnics are off limits too. The rules haven't loosened as the preserve's popularity has grown, which is part of why it's stayed what it was designed to be.
That contrast matters more than it might seem. A shopping center can announce a new identity every eighteen months because retail leases turn over and press releases are cheap to write. A wilderness preserve carved out of a 1970s development deal doesn't get a rebrand. It just keeps being the thing seven women fought to protect, one trail crossing at a time.
What this means for your next few weekends
If you're mapping out early September before the heat breaks, the honest version looks like this. Grab tacos at Taqueria de Diez or coffee at Starbucks Reserve if you haven't yet, since both are recent enough that you're not late to anything. Don't feel like you're behind on RVE Fitness. It's been there the whole time, and it'll be there next month too. And if you want the version of West Lake Hills that hasn't changed since before most of the neighborhood's current shopping options existed, get a weekend reservation for Wild Basin before the gate closes at sunset.
The neighborhood's retail mix will keep rotating, the way retail mixes do everywhere. The preserve won't. Knowing which is which is the difference between chasing every announcement and actually living here.
If you're weighing what a home in West Lake Hills is worth once you factor in the parts of the neighborhood that don't show up in a press release, Carl Shurr can walk you through it. Book an appointment when you're ready to talk specifics.
