Drive the Garden Hills stretch of Peachtree Road today and it's hard to picture what sat there for most of the last decade. A 2013 fire gutted the old Garden Hills Shopping Center, the strip that once housed Garden Hills Cinema and Fantasyland Records, a record shop that had held on for more than thirty years. The parcel at 2827 Peachtree sat behind chain-link for years afterward, long enough that a 2022 report on the stalled redevelopment described the lot as vacant for about seven years by that point, with construction only beginning as that story ran. Redevelopment proposals had come and gone in the meantime, several of them lightning rods for neighborhood pushback, while the two businesses that survived the fire, Fellini's Pizza and La Fonda Latina, kept operating next door through all of it.
This spring, the wait finally paid off. Clark's Steakhouse opened on the ground floor of the finished building, and what replaced that fence says something about how this corner of Buckhead is starting to function day to day. It's worth walking through in some detail, because the change is bigger than one restaurant.
What Filled the Gap
The ground floor of the new 2827 Peachtree building now belongs to Clark's Steakhouse, which opened April 23 under restaurateur Rich Clark, the same operator behind C&S Seafood and Oyster Bar in Vinings, Brookhaven and Sandy Springs. The room runs about 6,000 square feet and seats 170, built around a racetrack bar with a private event space called the Policy Room tucked to the side. Chef Zan Malik, previously of Kyma, runs the kitchen, and the wine list runs to roughly 550 bottles with a heavy lean toward Bordeaux, curated by a Certified Sommelier on staff. Weekday lunch service started May 4, which quietly makes Clark's one of the only white-tablecloth rooms in Garden Hills open at midday rather than just at night.
The design leans old-world on purpose. Early renderings and the finished room favor dark wood and detailed millwork over the glossier, more modern steakhouse look that's become common elsewhere in Atlanta. For a site that spent most of the last decade behind a fence before construction ever started, the interior reads more like something that's been there for decades, which is presumably the point.
Six months before Clark's opened, Revival Restaurants, the group behind The Ivy and Family Dog, took over the former Ivy space on Roswell Road and opened Luella, an Italian steakhouse with Japanese influences from brothers Jamey and Benjie Shirah. It's a different premise than Clark's Southern-inflected chophouse approach, and the two rooms aren't really competing for the same table. What they are doing, together, is giving Garden Hills residents two credible steakhouse options within a short drive of each other for the first time in years.
The Part That Actually Changes Your Week
Here's the piece that matters if you already live in Garden Hills rather than if you're just reading about it from outside: for years, "going out for a proper dinner" from this part of Peachtree Road meant driving into Buckhead Village or down to the hotel restaurants clustered near the St. Regis. The neighborhood itself had reliable, casual staples, Fellini's for pizza, La Fonda for Latin food, and a short walk over to Peachtree Hills got you the Treehouse, J. Christopher's or Paul's for brunch. What it didn't have was a room built for a client dinner, an anniversary, or the kind of evening where you want a wine list and a private table.
That gap is what just closed. A resident who wants dry-aged steak and a serious cellar no longer has to cross Peachtree into Buckhead Village proper. They can walk or take a short drive to a room built for exactly that occasion, sitting on a block that spent most of the last decade behind a fence.
There's a seasonal layer on top of this too. The Buckhead Theatre, restored to its original grandeur back in 2010, has kept a steady August concert calendar, and a night that pairs an early dinner with a show at the Theatre is a genuinely easy evening from this stretch of Peachtree now in a way it wasn't when the only late-night options nearby were a pizza counter and a taco spot.
The Institutions That Didn't Wait for Any of This
None of the new dining scene changes the neighborhood's oldest rhythms, and it's worth sitting with those for a moment, because they're what actually defines Garden Hills and neighboring Peachtree Heights East day to day.
The Duck Pond has been the center of Peachtree Heights East since Una Rivers deeded 7.35 acres of pond and parkland to a trust for the benefit of the neighborhood's residents after her husband's death in 1932. It's privately owned, one of just two large privately held parks in Buckhead, and neighbors have paid to maintain it ever since, spending more than $30,000 a year on upkeep that comes out of neighborhood association dues and fundraising rather than city budgets. The Ladies of the Lake Garden Club, known locally as LOL, has cared for the pond since the 1930s and officially organized as a club in 1974. Their Garden Party fundraiser, running since 1985, is scheduled for its 36th installment on May 2, 2027, still held right on the pond's peninsula, still adults-only, still the kind of event where the proceeds go straight back into keeping the water clean and the bridges standing.
The Garden Hills Pool runs on its own decades-old calendar too, and if you live nearby you already feel it shifting under you this month. Back-to-school hours began Sunday, August 2, which means the long, loose summer schedule of open swim and lap lanes has already tightened. Fall swim team practice for the Cool Sharks affects lap lane and diving board availability through September 6, when the season wraps with an End-of-Season meet starting at 9 a.m. that pushes the pool's public opening back to noon that day. Labor Day is the last day the pool is open to the general public. After that, it's members-only on weekends through September 20, and then it closes for the year.
None of that has anything to do with steakhouses or wine lists. It's the same institution running the same fall transition it's run for years, funded and staffed by the same neighborhood volunteer board that's kept it going since the pool and its clubhouse were first built in the 1930s.
Two Speeds, One Neighborhood
What's actually interesting about Garden Hills right now is that both of these things are true at once. A long-vacant lot just became a legitimate dining anchor with a sommelier and a private dining room, changing what a Tuesday night looks like for someone who lives three blocks away. At the same time, a pool that's been run by neighborhood volunteers since the 1930s is quietly sliding into its fall schedule exactly the way it has for years, and a garden club that's been tending the same pond since 1974 is already planning a fundraiser for a spring that's still eight months out.
That layering, new investment stacking on top of institutions that never asked for it and don't particularly need it, is a fair description of what it's like to live here this August. The steakhouse wars happening a block off Peachtree Road don't touch the Duck Pond's daily rhythm, and the pool's transition to fall hours doesn't care whether Clark's or Luella wins more of the neighborhood's dinner reservations. Both are just running on schedule, at the same time, in the same few blocks.
If you're weighing what a home in Garden Hills or Peachtree Heights East actually buys day to day, that combination, walkable new dining layered over decades-old community institutions that fund and run themselves, is a big part of the answer. Patti Junger has spent four decades watching Buckhead's neighborhoods absorb this kind of change without losing what made them worth living in to begin with, and her team is always glad to talk through what a particular block or street is actually like to live on before you make any decision about it. Reach out for a complimentary market valuation and private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
