On Huff Road, the heavy lifting is done. Crescent Communities’ Novel Blandtown, a seven-story, 250-apartment building rising where a PDI Kitchen, Bath, and Lighting showroom once stood at 1095 and 1121 Huff Road, is down to exterior finishes, sidewalks and site work. Peachtree Corners-based Fortune-Johnson is building it, and opening is scheduled for early 2027.
For anyone looking for a place to live on this side of town, the number to know is 25. That’s how many apartments will be reserved for households earning 60 percent of area median income or less, the 10 percent set-aside Crescent chose under the Beltline’s inclusionary zoning rules. Those units must stay affordable for 20 years. Rents, a leasing date and an application process haven’t been announced, so the months ahead are the window to watch. We’re tracking it on the registry page for 1095 Huff Rd.
What opens first
Plans always paired the apartments with a 4,700-square-foot retail building topped with a patio. That building is now reserved for a future phase, with no date announced. In the meantime, the corner opens as an urban plaza with hardscaping and a grassy knoll, according to project designers Niles Bolton Associates.
A correction to our own April coverage: we described the retail as gone. The accurate picture is that it’s deferred, with a plaza in the interim. No one involved has called it cancelled.
So day one brings homes and green space rather than shops, and residents will walk for the rest. Twisted Soul Cookhouse and Pours sits up the block at 1133 Huff Rd NW, AuthenTEAK Furniture and X3 Sports are across the street, and the Beltline’s Northwest Trail runs just north of Huff Road. Inside, residents get a clubhouse, about 50 bike parking spaces and a six-story, 322-space parking deck with a rooftop pool.
The road runs on its own schedule
Huff Road is getting work, just not on this block or this timeline. ATLDOT’s Huff Road Widening would add a center turn lane from Howell Mill Road to just west of Earnest Street, with construction listed from August 2027 to December 2028. The project has been in motion since 2017, and the city notes schedules can change. The Upper Westside Community Improvement District is designing a separate, neighboring segment. Neither, as described, reaches the 1095 block. The building isn’t waiting on the road, and the road was never planned around it.
A neighborhood filling in
Crescent has done this in Blandtown before. Its Novel West Midtown opened on Fairmont Avenue in late 2023, within walking distance, and set aside 10 percent of its apartments as affordable under the same rules. Those rules, adopted by City Council on Nov. 20, 2017, require new rental projects near the Beltline to set aside 10 percent of units at 60 percent of AMI or 15 percent at 80 percent, or pay a fee.
More is on the way. In June 2026, the Develop Fulton board approved a $3.9 million incentive for Alta West Midtown, a 247-unit Wood Partners project at 1593 Huber St. NW with 38 units at 80 percent of AMI or below.
The two numbers most likely to slip on a project like this are the unit count and the opening date, and both held. Designs went before the Beltline Design Review Committee in 2023, demolition began in late 2024, and the project is arriving on schedule with 250 apartments, 25 of them income-restricted for two decades. The retail moved, and that’s a real loss for anyone who pictured a coffee shop on that corner. A plaza is a thinner trade than a storefront with tenants. But if something had to wait, I’d rather it be the retail than the housing. What I’m watching now is when rents and the application process for those 25 apartments are published, because that’s the part residents can actually act on.
