Ask a handful of Westerly neighbors what's coming next and you'll hear the same three things back: the restaurant, the new clubhouse on the other side of Erie Parkway, and the underpass that's supposed to tie the two halves of the neighborhood together. Most people assume those three things are arriving roughly together, part of one continuous buildout. They aren't. Right now, only one of them has a shovel anywhere near it.
That gap matters if you live here, because it tells you what to actually expect this year versus what's still two or three years out, no matter how finished the renderings look.
The market breaks ground around now, not later
In February, Southern Land Company announced that Denver hospitality operator Dustin Chiappetta, the person behind Pearl Market & Wine and Carmella's in Denver, will open a neighborhood market and restaurant inside Westerly. The space is modest by design: about 6,400 square feet of market and dining inside a roughly 10,000-square-foot building, with the remaining square footage housing SLC Homes and the company's Colorado land development staff. According to SLC's own announcement, groundbreaking was targeted for early summer 2026, with a planned opening in 2027.
Mid-August puts us past that early summer target, so the market's foundation work should already be underway rather than sitting on a distant calendar. It's landing in the existing, already-built section of Westerly, the 400-acre parcel at the southeast corner of Erie Parkway and County Road 5 where the first homeowners moved in back in April 2023.
Chiappetta framed the project as something closer to joining a neighborhood than opening a new location. "This isn't about opening another location, it's about becoming part of a neighborhood," he said in the announcement. SLC president and COO Brian Sewell described the same idea from the developer's side, calling it "a gathering place that brings people together while adding a new level of everyday convenience for homeowners and the broader Erie community."
Worth noting: this isn't Westerly's only recent recognition. The community was named Community of the Year at the Denver Marketing & Merchandising Awards in November 2025, presented by the Home Builders Association of Metro Denver. That's third-party validation of the sales and design execution, not the daily-life story, but it's part of why a hospitality operator with Chiappetta's track record chose to build here rather than somewhere else.
What's already running, no groundbreaking required
Here's the part that gets lost in the restaurant news: Westerly's community life didn't wait for any of this. The Waypoint, the neighborhood's existing amenity center, opened with an official ribbon cutting attended by SLC founder and CEO Tim Downey and Erie's mayor. It's 6,100 square feet of fitness studio, coworking space, and community room, plus a resort-style pool, a 17-seat hot tub, and fire pits outside. Waner Construction built it, breaking ground in fall 2023.
What actually fills that space week to week comes from a dedicated Community Lifestyle Manager, and the calendar is more specific than most new-build marketing copy lets on:
- Ceramics classes and wine tastings
- Chef's dinners and kids' crafts
- A running Book Club
- A club called Bourbon Bro
- Hot yoga, pickleball, and tennis
If you're already living in south Westerly, this is the part of the neighborhood that's fully operational today, not a rendering. The trail network plugs into it too: 4.5 miles of hiking and biking paths that begin inside the community and connect to the Coal Creek Trail and the Erie Singletrack, with Soaring Heights PK-8 and Erie High School sitting directly across the street.
The other half of the neighborhood is still years behind
North Westerly is where the timeline stretches out. Southern Land Company bought this roughly 390-acre parcel from the Colorado State Land Board in 2023, and it sat in entitlement review for about two years. The rezoning finally got approved in July 2025, and the approval came with a real change: it cut the maximum residential units on that land from 4,266 down to 2,146, nearly cutting the original density in half.
Once built, the north side is planned to include single-family homes, townhomes, live-work townhomes, multifamily units, and active adult villas, along with more than 50 acres of parks and open space, over seven miles of new trail, and up to 150,000 square feet of commercial space inside a planned Town Center. A second, larger amenity center is planned there too, with its own fitness and wellness programming separate from The Waypoint.
One detail that tells you something about how these two halves were planned differently: north Westerly's design doesn't include its own school site, because the parcel already backs directly onto Erie High School and Soaring Heights PK-8. The 12.5 acres SLC is donating to St. Vrain Valley School District for a future middle school sits within the existing, southern part of Westerly instead.
None of this is close to breaking ground yet. Earlier reporting on the parcel's entitlement process put actual home construction on the north side at 2027, meaning the same year the restaurant is expected to open on the south side is roughly the year the north side is expected to start turning dirt for houses, not finish them.
The bridge is the whole story
That leaves the underpass, the piece that's supposed to make Westerly feel like one neighborhood instead of two developments split by a four-lane road. SLC has described a planned pedestrian underpass beneath Erie Parkway connecting north and south, but it follows the same sequencing as everything else on the north side: it comes after entitlements, after infrastructure, after the first phase of home construction gets underway.
So here's the actual order, as best the public record shows it right now: The Waypoint and its programming are already running. The Chiappetta market and restaurant should already have broken ground by now, with a 2027 opening on the south side. North Westerly's roughly 2,146 homes, its second amenity center, its Town Center, and the pedestrian underpass all sit behind a construction start that isn't expected before 2027, and years of buildout after that.
If you live in south Westerly today, that means your near-term reality is the restaurant landing in the next year or so, not the clubhouse across the parkway. If you're watching the north side because you're curious what's coming to that stretch of open land, the honest answer is: not this year, and probably not next year either. The underpass that would let you walk there instead of drive is tied to the slowest-moving piece of the whole plan.
Southern Land Company has been consistent that Westerly residents will eventually have access to everything on both sides of Erie Parkway. The part worth knowing now is that "eventually" runs on two very different clocks, and the food and drink is arriving on the faster one.
If you're weighing a move within Erie or into a growing community like this one, Peak Home Partners can walk you through what's actually built versus what's still on paper before you commit to a lot, a builder, or a phase. Request Your Home Valuation to start that conversation.
