Walk up North 25th Street toward Nine Mile Road on any weekday morning and you will pass a neighborhood that solved its biggest food problem seven years ago. The Church Hill North Retail Center opened in 2019 as a $40 million project, with $26.5 million of that funded through New Markets Tax Credit financing led by Capital One, and it delivered exactly what the area had been missing for decades: a locally run grocery store at Market at 25th, a full-service pharmacy in Hope Pharmacy, banking, and retail space in a stretch of the city that had gone without a grocer for more than twenty years. It was the kind of infrastructure investment that shows up in ribbon-cutting photos and stays solved.
What it didn't deliver, and what took until this spring to arrive, was a place to get a cup of coffee and sit down.
That gap has a name among people who track it closely. Rise, the coffee shop that had served Church Hill North, closed in 2024, and the blocks around 32nd Street went back to being what Axios Richmond has called a coffee shop desert. Meanwhile, a few blocks south, North 25th Street kept building a reputation as one of Richmond's better restaurant rows, anchored by Sub Rosa Bakery's wood-fired bread, Alewife, and The Broken Tulip. None of that helped a Church Hill North resident who wanted an espresso before work. Restaurant reputation and morning coffee access turned out to be two different problems, and only one of them had been solved.
Two Storefronts, One Season
The fix arrived from two directions at once, neither of them tied to the retail center that fixed everything else.
Peaberry Coffeehouse opened in late March 2026 at 1301 N. 32nd St, a few blocks from Oakwood Playground and Soul N' Vinegar. It comes from Alexa Schuett, who also owns Riverbend Roastery and Liberty Public House. The space reads more like a design magazine spread than a coffee counter: a bright blue exterior paired with a mustard yellow sofa and rose velvet chairs set beside floor-to-ceiling windows, with seating both inside and out. For a stretch of the neighborhood that had spent two years without a coffee shop of any kind, the specificity of the design choices matters less than the fact that there is now somewhere to sit.
Weeks later, Fable Flowers opened at 1003 N. 25th St, run by self-taught florist Angela Simakoff, who arranges bouquets out of her studio in the same building. Her business partner Alex Welch operates Sleepover Coffee out of the same address, pouring espresso and pour-over to start. The two have set up a rotating display of local art for sale and are positioning the space as a spot for community gatherings, not just a counter for takeout.
| Spot | Address | Opened | From the team behind |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peaberry Coffeehouse | 1301 N. 32nd St | March 2026 | Alexa Schuett (Liberty Public House, Riverbend Roastery) |
| Sleepover Coffee at Fable Flowers | 1003 N. 25th St | April 2026 | Alex Welch and Angela Simakoff |
Neither business had any relationship to the other before opening, and neither had any connection to the retail center project. They are small, independently financed storefronts that happened to land in the same season, and together they did something the $40 million development never managed: they gave Church Hill North a reason to walk somewhere for coffee instead of driving to it.
Why the Address Matters as Much as the Menu
It is worth sitting with where these two chose to open, because it is not where the existing food scene already lives. Sub Rosa, Alewife, and The Broken Tulip cluster closer to East Broad Street, in the part of Church Hill that has drawn visitors from across the metro for years. Peaberry and Fable Flowers both opened further north, closer to the residential blocks around 32nd Street and the stretch of 25th nearer Nine Mile Road, the same footprint the retail center was built to serve in 2019.
That is not a coincidence so much as a correction. A neighborhood's dinner reputation does not fix its 7 a.m. problem. The restaurant row solved where to eat on a Friday night. It took two much smaller bets, placed specifically in the residential core rather than alongside the established dining strip, to solve where to go before work on a Tuesday.
The Hill Café has held down that role in its own way since 1989, serving as Church Hill's original neighborhood spot on East Broad Street, but its hours run more toward lunch and dinner service than the drop-in, laptop-friendly rhythm that Peaberry and Sleepover Coffee are built around. What changed this spring was not that Church Hill gained another restaurant. It gained the specific kind of daily-use space that a grocery store and pharmacy, however well built, were never designed to provide.
The Rest of the Season Filled In Around It
The coffee shift landed alongside other small signs that Church Hill's public spaces are getting attention this year. The Church Hill Spring Fest and Market returned to Libby Hill Park in May, bringing the neighborhood's market and festival tradition back to the park that gave Richmond its name. Over at Chimborazo Park, the basketball courts have been getting a facelift, the kind of small parks upkeep that rarely makes headlines but changes how a block gets used on a Saturday afternoon.
None of these projects are connected to each other in any formal sense. A festival organizer, a parks crew, and two unrelated small business owners do not coordinate a calendar. But taken together, they describe a neighborhood where the daily-use spaces, the ones a resident interacts with weekly rather than the ones highlighted in a development press release, are quietly catching up to Church Hill's reputation.
What This Actually Changes
If you have lived in Church Hill North through the last two years, the practical shift is simple. There are now two places within walking distance of most residential blocks to get coffee, sit down, and see people you know, where before there was a genuine gap that a $40 million grocery and pharmacy project did not touch. The Church Hill Association, which has organized around the neighborhood's civic life since 1964, keeps a running account of what is changing block by block, and it is worth following if you want the next update before it becomes common knowledge.
The larger point is that neighborhood investment does not arrive in one size. Church Hill North needed a grocery store, and it got one, funded and financed at a scale that made the local news for years. It also needed a coffee shop, and that took two independent operators making a bet on specific addresses, years after the bigger project was finished. Both were real needs. Only one of them showed up on a balance sheet.
If you are watching how Church Hill continues to fill in, block by block, that is exactly the kind of texture worth tracking, not because it changes a listing price, but because it changes what living on these blocks actually feels like day to day. Steven Moss keeps an eye on these shifts across Church Hill and the rest of Richmond's close-in neighborhoods, and is always glad to talk through what is changing in the area you call home. Let's connect.
