Ask a longtime Peachtree Hills resident where the neighborhood actually gathers and most will point you toward the old corner: Peachtree Road, Peachtree Hills Avenue, Kings Circle. That's fair. Whitehall Tavern has been pouring beer and building Dirty Bird sandwiches at 2391 Peachtree Road for years, Richard's Variety Store still stocks wooden puzzles and gag gifts nobody else in Atlanta carries, and Treehouse, J. Christopher's, and Paul's have anchored brunch plans for a decade. None of that has gone anywhere.
But if you've eaten dinner in Peachtree Hills in the last year, there's a decent chance you did it somewhere that used to sell fabric samples to interior designers.
A Trade Building Learns to Feed Its Neighbors
The Atlanta Decorative Arts Center has operated a Buckhead campus for more than sixty years as a wholesale hub for design professionals, the kind of place with showrooms rather than storefronts. Its western outpost, ADAC West, sits inside Peachtree Hills at 349 Peachtree Hills Avenue. Chef Kevin Rathbun opened KR SteakBar there in February 2013, then added a private speakeasy called The Bureau about two years after that. For close to a decade, that pairing was ADAC West's entire food and drink identity: one steakhouse, one hidden bar, tucked inside a building most Atlantans still associate with showroom appointments, not dinner reservations.
Then last August, Rathbun brought back Krog Bar. Not the original Krog Street wine bar he closed in 2020 alongside Rathbun's in Inman Park, but a new version built around coal-fired pizza, in a space that used to house Harmonious Living by Tish Mills Interiors before that design firm relocated to ADAC's main campus. The new Krog Bar is small, about 950 square feet with room for 28 people inside and another 20 on a garden patio. The menu runs eight pizzas deep, including the Pomodoro, the Margherita, a clam pie, and one called the KROG, an acronym for Kevin Rathbun Original Gangsta. There's also the Isabella, named for Rathbun's granddaughter.
That's three distinct concepts from the same chef, stacked inside the same wholesale design building, built up over more than a decade rather than launched all at once. It's not a restaurant row. It's a design campus that quietly became one.
The Galleries Two Doors Down
Walk a few storefronts past ADAC West and you land at The Galleries of Peachtree Hills, a cluster of five connected buildings at 425 Peachtree Hills Avenue that has functioned as an antiques and fine art destination for years. Inside, you'll find dealers like Edgar-Reeves Lighting and Antiques, Ferrari Fine Art, Parc Monceau, and Ravan Interiors, each running its own small gallery rather than a shared showroom floor. It's the kind of browsing that used to require a trip to Bennett Street or Miami Circle. Now it's on the same short stretch of avenue as dinner.
What's changed isn't the galleries themselves. It's that they now sit inside a walkable loop that didn't exist in the same way five years ago: park once, eat at Krog Bar or KR SteakBar, wander the Galleries afterward, maybe stop into Richard's Variety Store on the way back to the car. None of these businesses coordinated with each other. They just happen to occupy the same three blocks of Peachtree Hills Avenue, and that proximity is doing more to shape how people spend an evening here than any single opening could on its own.
The Trail That Hasn't Caught Up Yet
Here's where the timeline gets interesting. Peachtree Hills gets lumped in with Atlanta's BeltLine neighborhoods often enough that it's easy to assume the trail already runs through it. It doesn't, not yet.
The Atlanta BeltLine's Northwest Trail is being built in segments, and the segment closest to Peachtree Hills, Segment 2, is split into three sections. Section A runs from Bobby Jones Golf Course to a Georgia Power substation. Section C runs from the Peachtree Road crossing to the Peachtree Park Apartments, closer to Peachtree Hills' own edge. Section B is the Peachtree Road crossing itself, which requires an entirely new GDOT tunnel under the road.
According to the BeltLine's own construction update from June 2026, Sections 2A and 2C are shovel ready, with all real estate work complete. Section 2A went out to bid in early June with a bid date in July and anticipated construction starting in September. Section 2C is expected to go out to bid in early fall, with construction beginning no later than early 2027. The tunnel crossing at Peachtree Road, the piece that would actually stitch this segment together, is still being coordinated with GDOT's separate bridge replacement project, without a firm construction start.
Meanwhile, a different piece of the Northwest Trail, Section 3A between Trabert Avenue and Northside Drive, has been complete and open for a while now. So residents already have trail access nearby. What they don't have yet is the direct connection that will eventually link Peachtree Hills into the larger loop by way of the Peachtree Road tunnel. That piece is still a year or more out, even under an optimistic bid timeline.
The neighborhood's own civic organization has been present at every step of this. When the BeltLine broke ground on an earlier phase of the Northwest Trail, John Matthews, president of the Peachtree Hills Civic Association, stood alongside Atlanta City Council members and Mayor Andre Dickens for the announcement. That's not a neighborhood waiting passively for infrastructure. It's one that's been showing up to watch it get built, section by section, while everyday life kept moving without it.
The Order Things Actually Happened In
Put the two threads next to each other and the shape of the last few years gets clearer. The dining and retail cluster along Peachtree Hills Avenue built itself up gradually and organically: a steakhouse in 2013, a speakeasy around 2015, a pizzeria in 2025, an antiques row that predates all of it. None of that depended on the BeltLine showing up first. The trail, by contrast, is still working through land acquisition and bid schedules for the exact section that would connect Peachtree Hills to the rest of the loop, with a realistic construction start sometime after this fall.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live here. The assumption in a lot of intown Atlanta coverage is that a BeltLine connection is what turns a neighborhood into a walkable destination. Peachtree Hills is proof that the walkable evening can arrive well before the trail segment does. The three blocks of Peachtree Hills Avenue between ADAC West and the Galleries already function as a loop you can do on foot, tonight, without waiting on a GDOT tunnel. When Section 2C does eventually open, it'll extend a pattern that Rathbun, the Galleries' dealers, and Richard's Variety Store already built without it.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Peachtree Hills is actually worth once you factor in both what's already open and what's still coming, The Boyd Team knows this corridor block by block. Request a confidential consultation and we'll walk you through it.
