If you've driven past Atlantic and Swinton this year and thought "still not done," you were right and wrong at the same time. The Sundy House, the wraparound-porch centerpiece everyone in Delray has been waiting to see reopen, is still closed for restoration. But treating that whole corner as a construction zone to avoid until the ribbon-cutting means you've missed a small restaurant row that already opened around it, one lease at a time, starting more than six months ago.

Here's the part that surprised even people who track this stuff closely: Phase One of Sundy Village received its certificate of occupancy and delivered in September 2025, bringing 100,000 square feet of office space, 30,000 square feet of retail and dining, and 268 underground parking spaces to a corner that used to be mostly vacant lot and chain-link fence. Leasing hit 88 percent almost immediately, with another 8,500 square feet under negotiation that would push occupancy past 92 percent. That's not a groundbreaking announcement. That's a nearly full building.

What's Already Pouring, Slicing, and Serving

Barcelona Wine Bar opened January 17, 2026, the first full-service restaurant to open its doors at Sundy Village, and it's already the kind of place where you plan ahead rather than walk in. Executive chef Javier Narváez prints the menu daily and adjusts it with the seasons, but the core stays the same: jamón and Manchego croquetas, patatas bravas, boquerones, a rotating lineup of paellas. The wine list runs more than 400 bottles, with roughly 40 available by the glass, one of the more ambitious pours in Palm Beach County. Van Leeuwen Ice Cream is open too, tucked into the same retail run.

Neither of those is the flashiest name on the roster. That distinction belongs to the restaurants still filling in.

Drinking Pig BBQ, a Miami smokehouse known for oak-smoked brisket with Caribbean and Asian influences, is targeting a September 2026 opening. Maman, the French bakery and café that built a following in New York's SoHo before expanding across Florida, was tracking toward a late-summer opening as of this spring, which means it could already be pouring coffee by the time you read this. Double Knot, the Japanese izakaya expanding from its Philadelphia flagship and Wynwood location, has a lease signed and a ten-course tasting menu ready to go, but no opening date yet. And Delray Beach Craft Brewing, a locally owned operation with its own beer program, is moving into 1,143 square feet inside the restored Cathcart House on Swinton Avenue, one of the historic homes the project kept rather than tore down.

The Corner's Actual Timeline

Read that table the way you'd read a construction schedule and the story flips. The names people are most curious about, the barbecue joint and the izakaya, are the ones still finishing buildouts. The corner already works for a weeknight glass of Rueda and a scoop of ice cream. It just doesn't have everything yet.

The Garage Everyone Forgets to Mention

Parking used to be the real argument against walking to this stretch of downtown. That argument is mostly gone now, and almost nobody talks about it.

• 268 underground spaces are already open to the public, with the self-parking entrance on SW 1st Avenue between Atlantic Avenue and SW 1st Street
• The first 15 minutes are free through the ParkMobile app, zone 1936
• Valet service is coming later this year once the restaurant lineup fills out
• Fourteen spaces have ChargePoint EV chargers, first come, first served
• A second garage with 165 more spaces is under construction as part of Phase Two, and it will be open to the public after 6 p.m. on weekdays and all day on weekends

That second garage sits inside a 79,141-square-foot office building going up at 100 SE First Avenue, with 3,400 square feet of new ground-floor retail attached at 48 SE First Avenue. None of that is open yet, and Pebb Capital hasn't published a firm date for when that piece of the project wraps.

The One Piece Still Missing

Here's the detail that reorders the whole story. The Sundy House itself, the 1902 structure that gives the whole seven-acre project its name and its identity as a historic centerpiece, is the last piece to come back. It's still closed. Everything else, the office towers at 88 percent leased, the restaurant row filling in one lease at a time, the garage already taking your parking payment through an app, arrived first.

"Tenants see a strategic advantage to doing business where workplaces, amenities and lifestyle converge," said Todd Rosenberg, Co-Founder and Managing Principal at Pebb Capital, the firm developing the project.

That quote was about office leasing, but it applies just as well to why the corner already feels different on a Tuesday night even with the marquee building still behind fencing. You don't need the whole campus finished to notice the change. You just need to have walked past it in the last month.

Two Blocks Away, Summer Never Paused

While Swinton and Atlantic finishes its slow rollout, the rest of downtown kept its calendar running without waiting for anyone. The 6th Annual Unity Fest filled 50 NW 1st Avenue on August 1, and Coco Market took over Old School Square the next morning with its usual mix of vendors and free fitness classes.

Looking ahead, Old School Square has Sounds of the Set scheduled for August 27 at Libby Wesley Plaza, and Delray's tribute to Jimmy Buffett, "Party in Paradise," lands August 28. A women's wellness event called Delray's Hottest Party takes over the Vintage Gym at Old School Square on August 22. None of that required a single new restaurant to open. It's the same rhythm downtown has had for years, running two blocks from a construction site that's slowly turning into somewhere else to end up afterward.

That's really the thing worth sitting with. The corner didn't wait for its own grand opening to start mattering. It's already changing how a night out downtown gets planned, which restaurant opens first, which garage you use, whether you walk from Old School Square or drive straight to Atlantic and Swinton. The Sundy House reopening will be a real event when it happens. It just isn't the event that already changed anything.

If you're weighing what a shift like this means for a home near downtown, or you're simply trying to figure out where the next few blocks of change are headed, Cheran Marek tracks these developments as they unfold, not after the fact. Request a personalized home valuation to talk through what it means for your address specifically.