If you drive West Alabama or cut across Buffalo Speedway on your way to Levy Park, you already know the corner. Chain link, a tower climbing faster than seems reasonable, cranes that have been part of the skyline for the better part of a year. What most people driving past don't know is that half of that project is already finished and occupied, while the half everyone is actually excited about is still a hole in the ground with a rendering taped to the fence.
That gap is the story. Not the tower itself, and not what it will eventually be worth to anyone. The gap between "open" and "open to you."
What's Finished, and What Isn't
The project is called The RO, Transwestern's 17-acre redevelopment of the old Exxon research campus at West Alabama and Buffalo Speedway, just south of River Oaks proper. It's four distinct pieces built in two phases, and right now those pieces are at wildly different stages.
| Component | What it is | Status as of late summer 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Office tower | 145,000 sq ft, fully leased to Vitol, the Geneva-based energy trader | Scheduled for tenant occupancy in June 2026 |
| The Birdsall | 34-story Auberge Collection hotel and 44 condos | Under construction, part of a phase slated for completion in early 2028 |
| The Clayton | 317-unit luxury apartment tower | Under construction, same phase and timeline as the Birdsall |
| Retail Village | 80,000 sq ft, up to eight restaurants plus boutiques | Ground broke last fall; initial retail leases expected to be announced in late 2026, with a 108,576-square-foot anchor retail building targeted for completion by March 2028 |
Read that table again and notice what it actually says. The single piece of The RO on track to be finished on the original schedule is the piece nobody outside a commercial lease can walk into. Vitol's own move-in date was set for this past June, months before the first restaurant lease is even expected to be announced. The retail village that shows up in every rendering, the one with cobblestone paths and oak trees and eight restaurants, is still a year and a half or more from opening its doors.
Why Office Opens First, Every Time
This isn't Transwestern moving slowly. It's how every mixed-use project of this size gets financed, and it's worth understanding if you plan to be walking past this corner for years.
A single corporate tenant like Vitol can sign a lease for raw office space long before there's a single finished storefront next door, because the tenant is betting on the building, not the neighborhood around it. A restaurant group can't make that same bet. Nobody signs an eight-figure buildout for a dining room until they can stand in the finished shell, see the finished streetscape, and get a real read on foot traffic. That's why the office always finishes first and the storefronts always trail behind by a year or more, even when both were announced on the same day.
The practical version, for anyone who already lives in this corridor: the "walkable village" you've seen in the marketing isn't a delay or a broken promise. It's the order these projects always run in. The workers show up first. The restaurants show up once there's a reason for them to.
Two Blocks Away, a Different Bet
Here's the part that makes this corner more interesting than a single project update. A few blocks north on Kirby Drive, Southern Land Company broke ground last spring on its own project at 2811 Kirby Drive, a 38-story residential tower called Lily River Oaks paired with a separate office building. It's making a smaller, different bet on the same idea. Where The RO's retail village runs to roughly 80,000 square feet spread across freestanding buildings with underground parking so the whole plaza can be car-free, 2811 Kirby's retail and restaurant space totals only about 15,000 square feet built into the base of the towers themselves, the more familiar podium-retail approach Houston has used for years.
Put simply: within a few blocks of each other, two developers are testing two theories about what Upper Kirby wants next. One is betting people will park once and walk. The other is betting people will still want to pull up in front of the door. You'll get to watch both experiments finish within roughly the same window, on the same stretch of road you already drive.
The Fenced Lot Nobody Will Explain
If you've noticed a patch of ground inside The RO's footprint that isn't part of the visible construction, you're not imagining it. A 4.7-acre parcel within the site is owned by an entity tied to Occidental Petroleum, a longtime tenant of nearby Greenway Plaza, and neither Occidental nor Transwestern has said publicly what's planned for it. It's just sitting there, inside a $400 million-plus construction zone, unaccounted for in every rendering released so far. If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what a fence is actually for, this is the one piece of the story where the honest answer is that nobody outside the two companies involved knows yet.
Why the New Tower Looks Like an Old One
One detail worth knowing if you appreciate the architecture on this side of town: The Birdsall, the 34-story hotel and condo tower at the center of The RO, is named after Birdsall Briscoe, the architect who designed many of River Oaks' original 1920s estates. That's not incidental. The design team pulled reclaimed Cedar Bayou brick and other material cues directly from those historic homes, an intentional decision to make a 34-story tower feel like it belongs across the street from houses built a century earlier. If the new building ends up looking more traditional than you'd expect for something this tall, that's why.
What's Already Open While You Wait
The construction fences aren't the whole neighborhood right now, and it's worth remembering what's already up and running a short walk from all of it.
- Pinkerton's Barbecue, at 3801 Farnham Street, opened earlier this year and is run by pitmaster Grant Pinkerton, a name most Houston barbecue regulars already know from his run on Texas Monthly's Top 50 list.
- Levy Park itself, the five-acre green space anchoring the district, has kept its usual rotation of free programming going all year, alongside its existing dog park, splash pad, and Hearsay Levy Park restaurant on site.
- Two new restaurants from chef Tim Love were slated to land in Levy Park by the end of summer 2026, adding to the park's existing food and drink lineup rather than waiting on either tower to finish.
None of that is waiting on cranes to come down. It's already part of the daily rotation if you live nearby.
The Honest Version
If someone asks you what's going on at that corner, the accurate answer isn't "a new luxury development is coming." It's more specific than that: an office tower was built for a single corporate tenant and set to open this past June, a hotel and two residential towers are climbing on the same site as part of a phase not slated to finish until early 2028, the walkable retail everyone actually wants won't even have its first leases announced until late this year, a few blocks away a competing developer is betting on a smaller, more traditional version of the same idea, and a fifth of the original site still has no announced plan at all.
That's not a story about property values. It's a story about knowing what you're actually looking at the next time you drive past.
We follow projects like The RO closely, not because every one of our clients is buying or selling on this block, but because understanding a neighborhood's actual timeline, not just its marketing renderings, is part of what it means to know a market well. If you're curious how developments like this one are shaping values in River Oaks and Upper Kirby specifically, our team at Carol Wolfe Properties tracks this corridor closely and is always glad to talk through what we're seeing. You can also request a confidential home valuation any time you're curious where your own address fits into the current picture.
