Drive SH 114 past Trophy Club Town Hall on any given afternoon and you will pass the same stretch of mowed grass and chain-link that has sat quiet for years. It looks like nothing is happening there. Something is. In August 2025, a consultant walked into a council meeting with a concept plan for that land, one that included apartments. Council members did not like it. They tabled it on the spot.
That single meeting tells you more about how Trophy Club is going to change than any development map. This is not a town waiting for the market to decide what gets built on its last open ground. It is a town actively saying no to at least one version of growth, on purpose, in public, and choosing something more deliberate instead.
The 95 Percent Line
Town Manager Brandon Wright put a number on it this past spring. Trophy Club is about 95 percent developed, he told Community Impact in late April 2026, with two large parcels left. That is not a rounding error. In a town this size, two undeveloped tracts near Town Hall are effectively the last cards in the deck.
The plan for those acres has a name: the Grove at TC. It covers roughly 7.4 acres along SH 114 near Town Hall, and the town has already spent real money trying to get it right. Trophy Club hired Catalyst Commercial Inc. for advisory work at $5,500 a month for up to 14 months, and brought on Core Location Advisor for brokerage services under a $77,000 contract, according to Wright. The town's own Small Area Plan page confirms council finalized the plan framework on October 27, 2025, after months of community meetings and a resident survey.
That is a lot of process for 7.4 acres. It is also the point. Wright described the approach in plain terms: "There is not really much development left in Trophy Club, so we can be very slow and intentional and selective."
The Meeting Where Apartments Lost
Slow and intentional is not just a phrase. It happened in a specific room, on a specific date. During the August 25, 2025 council meeting, the town's planning consultant, McAdams, presented redevelopment concepts for the Grove at TC alongside Catalyst. One option included mixed-use development with retail and apartments. Council members pushed back, and the plan was tabled rather than approved.
Council Member Rhylan Rowe framed the stakes during that same meeting: "We have 5 acres in one spot; we have over two in another that are ours to figure out how to develop." That is the entire remaining inventory of a town, described in two clauses. Once those acres are spoken for, there is no third parcel waiting in reserve.
The apartment concept getting tabled is the detail most people driving past that empty lot will never know, and it is the detail that actually explains what happens next. Trophy Club is not short on ideas for its last land. It is short on land, and it just ruled out one category of building that could have gone there.
The Same Highway, a Different Bet Next Door
The contrast sharpens when you keep driving east on 114 into Southlake. Along that same 2.2-mile corridor, three separate projects are moving forward on a combined 46 acres in Southlake, dwarfing Trophy Club's 7.4.
The largest is Shivers Farm, a 40-acre mixed-use project at SH 114 and North White Chapel Boulevard. Southlake City Council approved Trademark Property Co.'s $120 million plan in October 2025, which includes a grocery store, office space, retail, and 37 single-family housing lots. A few miles down, restaurateur Tim McEneny is developing a 6-acre tract at West Kirkwood Boulevard and SH 114 for Dakota's Steakhouse, an event center, and a shopping center with seven retail suites. The steakhouse alone will stand 35 feet tall with a 60-foot waterfall inside, visible from the highway. Vertical construction on Dakota's was slated to begin in June 2026, with the event center following in 2027.
Southlake's director of economic development, Daniel Cortez, summed up the mood on that side of the line: getting spaces filled along 114 "signals northeast Tarrant County is still growing." Trophy Club is telling a quieter, more careful version of the same story on far less ground, and its own council just showed it is willing to slow that story down further rather than take the first offer.
What Selective Actually Looks Like on the Ground
The Grove at TC is still a plan, not a built thing. But you do not have to wait for it to see how Trophy Club treats its existing commercial space. The town runs a Thrive Business Grant program that reimburses local businesses up to $20,000, on a 75 percent match, for facade work, signage, and equipment upgrades. It is now in its third cycle. Look at how the previous round of money actually got spent:
- Grace Development, which owns the Shops of Trophy Club strip center, used its grant to repair and repaint the exterior along SH 114
- Fish & Knife Japanese Cuisine, a tenant in that same strip, added new tables, a booth, a refrigerator, and a hibachi grill
- Jolley Orthodontics added dental chairs to expand its office
- Mathnasium installed new signage and updated its furniture and lighting
- Trophy Club Vision Care and Envision Complete Fitness rounded out the six-business list, with Envision proposing the largest project, at $120,000, for cryotherapy, infrared sauna, and compression therapy equipment, though it never signed its performance agreement and the award reverted to the fund
That is six named businesses, mostly small and locally run, getting help to improve storefronts that already exist rather than the town courting a single big anchor tenant. It is a pattern that shows up again in what has actually opened recently. A Chipotle went in at the intersection of Highway 114 and Trophy Club Drive, a modest footprint compared to a Trademark-scale grocery anchor. The town's most talked-about newer restaurant, Social Oak Wine & Whiskey Lounge, is a pour-your-own wine and whiskey bar, not a chain. HG Sply Co, a longtime local favorite, still ranks as one of the most ordered dinner spots in town on delivery platforms.
None of this is what a 40-acre, $120 million anchor project looks like. It is what a town that describes itself as "very slow and intentional" actually does while it decides what belongs on its last two parcels.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
If you live in Trophy Club, the practical takeaway is not that big change is coming. It is that the change already happening is happening in small, named pieces, at your neighborhood strip center, not through a single groundbreaking you will read about once and then watch rise for two years. The Grove at TC will move at the pace of council meetings and small area plan revisions, not at the pace of a developer's press release. The next real estate news out of your own Town Hall corridor will likely be another consultant report or another grant cycle before it is ever a ribbon cutting.
That is worth knowing the next time you notice that stretch of grass along 114 still sitting empty. It is not empty because nobody has a plan. It is empty because the town already turned one plan down.
If you are watching how these decisions ripple through property values or curious what a slower-growth corridor means for your own home down the line, The Verrett Team keeps a close eye on how North DFW towns like Trophy Club are shaping their next chapter. Reach out anytime you want to talk through what it means for you.
