Walk into the storefront next to Lake Anne Brew House this month and you will find yourself sinking into a low-slung Danish modern lounge chair, a teak coffee table at your knee, a shelf of zero-proof drinks within reach. Nothing is roped off. The lamps, the barware, the framed art on the walls, all of it is for sale, and you are meant to sit with it before you decide whether to buy it. The shop is called Vintage Reston. Owners Melissa and Jason Romano describe the concept in three words.
"Sit, sip, shop."
It is a good afternoon. It is also, if you know what used to be in that space, a small piece of evidence for something bigger happening at Lake Anne this fall: a plaza that keeps filling itself in while the county's plan to formally redevelop it keeps not arriving.
A Storefront That Sat Dark for Two Years
Before Vintage Reston, that unit on Washington Plaza held Chesapeake Chocolates. Before that, it sat empty for most of two years, one of the visible gaps that have dogged Lake Anne's retail row for longer than most residents have lived here. The Romanos' shop exists because a permit for the Brew House's expansion into that same space is still pending. When the permit clears and the taproom grows into the unit, Vintage Reston closes. It was built to be temporary from the day it opened.
That is not incidental. It is close to the whole story of how Lake Anne fills its storefronts right now. A local business with an open lease slot lends it out for a low-risk pop-up rather than let it sit dark for a third year. It keeps the Brew House's landlord patient through a slow approval process, gives a design retailer a way to test whether the plaza can support that kind of shop, and gives residents a reason to park at the market lot and walk the extra thirty feet to see what's inside.
A Revitalization Plan That's Been Building Since 1998
The reason storefronts here sit empty long enough to need a stopgap traces back to how long Fairfax County has been trying to fix this specific 44-acre stretch of Reston. The county designated the Lake Anne Village Center a Commercial Revitalization Area in 1998, the same tool it has used to try to draw reinvestment to the plaza for the better part of three decades. In the years since, the county has bought the Crescent Apartments, adopted a Comprehensive Plan Amendment in 2009 meant to guide redevelopment around Washington Plaza, and run a design charrette with residents and merchants to sketch out what a revived village center could look like.
Lake Anne earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, recognition of the plaza Whittlesey and Conklin designed in 1965 as the first of Reston's village centers, the one meant to prove that a mix of homes, offices, and shops could work at a pedestrian scale around a lake. The historic designation protects what makes Lake Anne look the way it does. It has not, on its own, filled the empty units.
A Redevelopment That's Still a Study, Not a Shovel
The most recent piece of that unfinished plan moved forward this year, and it says a lot about the pace here. Fairfax County's Board of Supervisors voted this spring to have planning staff review a comprehensive plan amendment for the Crescent Apartments, the 181-unit complex on Cameron Crescent Drive that the county has owned since 2006 and transferred to the Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority in 2025. Reston Community Center is now weighing whether to relocate its smaller Washington Plaza facility to that Crescent site once redevelopment happens, since its current lease still runs another 13 years and RCC says it has already outgrown the space.
Thirteen years of lease runway on a facility RCC has already outgrown is not urgency. It is the kind of number that tells you this timeline is measured in planning cycles, not seasons. A private developer would still need to be found, a design finalized, and construction financed before any of this changes what a resident sees walking across the plaza.
What's Actually Filling the Calendar This Fall
None of that stopped Lake Anne from having one of its fuller programming stretches of the year. The Wednesday sunset concert series in the main parking lot wrapped its summer run in late August, having pulled bands like Four Star Combo and Texas Chainsaw Horns to the waterfront on back-to-back weeks. That series closing doesn't mean the plaza goes quiet. Here's what's still ahead:
| Date | What's Happening | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Saturdays through Nov. 21 | Reston Farmers Market, 8 a.m. to noon | Lake Anne lot |
| Sept. 12 | Reggae on the Lake | Lake Anne Plaza |
| Oct. 16 to Nov. 7 | "Once Upon a Mattress," Reston Community Players' 60th season opener | Leila Gordon Theatre, Hunters Woods |
The farmers market alone runs eleven more Saturdays this year, which means anyone who has been meaning to swing by has a solid stretch of fall weekends to do it before the season closes for winter.
A Theater Company That Never Waited on a Developer
The Reston Community Players item on that list is worth sitting with, because it is the clearest example of Lake Anne's actual engine. The troupe's first production, a musical called "The Greatest Game in Town," ran July 15 through 17, 1966, at the South Riding Center Stables, less than two years after Reston's first residents moved into the Lake Anne Village Center in December 1964. More than 230 productions later, the company that grew out of that first weekend has been a charter member of the Washington Area Theatre Community Honors coalition since 1999 and is regularly among the groups receiving the most nominations and awards at that regional competition.
This season marks 60 years, and the group built its four-show slate around giving women more of the lead roles after a run of male-heavy musicals. "Once Upon a Mattress" opens Oct. 16 and runs through Nov. 7 at the 260-seat Leila Gordon Theatre inside Reston Community Center's Hunters Woods facility. "Harvey" follows in January, "The Trojan Women" in February, and "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" closes the season in the spring. None of that required a developer, a comprehensive plan amendment, or a vote from the Board of Supervisors. It required volunteers who kept showing up for six decades.
The Real Pattern at Lake Anne
Put the pieces next to each other and the pattern gets hard to miss. A furniture pop-up fills a storefront while a permit clears. A farmers market fills a parking lot every Saturday from spring through Thanksgiving week. A community theater company fills a stage every season it has run since 1966, redevelopment plan or not. Even this year's Celebrate Reston festival added something new to that list: the inaugural Lake Anne Good Neighbor Awards, presented by Hunter Mill District Supervisor Walter Alcorn at OmBaked CBD Boutique, an idea that came from a plaza merchant rather than from the county's revitalization office.
None of these things fix the empty units the way a finished redevelopment plan eventually might. What they do is keep the plaza worth walking across in the meantime, which is a different kind of work and, on the evidence of this fall's calendar, one that Lake Anne's residents and small business owners have gotten fairly good at doing on their own.
If you're spending a Saturday at Lake Anne this month, the order that makes sense is the market first, since it closes at noon, then a walk through Vintage Reston while the chairs are still there to sit in, then whatever the plaza has running that week. Circle back for Reggae on the Lake on Sept. 12, and put Oct. 16 on the calendar if you want to see what a 60-year-old theater company opens a season with.
For anyone who already calls Lake Anne home and wants a straight answer on what a season like this one actually means for the block you live on, Daniel Gwak has been tracking Reston's village centers closely enough to talk through it without a sales pitch attached. Reach out anytime you want a local read on the neighborhood, whether or not a move is anywhere on your radar.
