A 6,000-square-foot chophouse with a 550-bottle wine list and an 18-seat private room called The Policy Room opened on April 23, 2026 on the ground floor of the 2827 Peachtree building. Its parking deck wraps around Fellini's Pizza and LaFonda Latina, the two neighborhood icons that survived the 2013 fire on that block and never left. That is now the front door of Garden Hills.
Walk one block inland from that door and you are on Pinetree Drive, headed toward the pool. The pool charges $5 at the gate, closes the water for a quarter-hour every weekday at 1:00 to swap public swim for members-only hours, and shuts entirely at 2 P.M. on home-meet Tuesdays so the Cool Sharks can race. The two rhythms live inside the same one-square-mile neighborhood, and 2026 is the year the split finally reads as a feature rather than a contradiction.
The thesis for a resident's summer here is simple. Garden Hills is not evolving into something else. Its Peachtree edge is doing what Peachtree always did, only more expensively, and its interior is doing what a 1925 garden-suburb interior was designed to do, only with the centennial fresh in everyone's memory. If you live here, planning your week around the seam between the two is the whole game.
The Peachtree Edge Just Got a New Anchor
Rich Clark, the restaurateur behind C&S Seafood and Oyster Bar, first announced his steakhouse in late 2024 for a 2025 opening. Construction and design refinements pushed it into spring, and Clark's Steakhouse opened in the Garden Hills neighborhood on Peachtree Road, featuring prime steaks and Southern sides. Executive Chef Zan Malik is running a wood-fired kitchen with Meat by Linz prime cuts, including a 22-ounce reserve prime lollipop ribeye and dry-aged selections alongside domestic and Japanese Wagyu. Sommelier Alexa Robertson built a 550-bottle wine program weighted toward Bordeaux, Burgundy, Italy, and Napa, with a Champagne list running underneath it.
The room seats 170, including a 30-seat racetrack bar and the private Policy Room. Z-Space Design and CNNA finished the interior in dark wood, terrazzo, Scalamandre velvet, and portraits of Atlanta figures including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ted Turner. That is a lot of program for one ground-floor lease, and it matters because 2827 Peachtree has been the neighborhood's swing address for years. Marketing materials for the building had earlier promised a chef-driven French bistro in that footprint. It arrived instead as a chophouse with New York bones and Southern sides.
For residents, the practical read is that the Peachtree strip now has an at-anchor destination the neighborhood didn't previously supply. The 2013 fire took most of the retail block. Fellini's slice window and LaFonda's patio filled the years since. Clark's replaces the missing third piece, and it does so in the ground floor of a building whose parking deck already serves the other two. A Wednesday can now credibly begin with a $6 slice on Fellini's patio and end with a martini at Clark's without moving your car.
The Interior Runs on a Different Clock
One block off Peachtree, the schedule shifts entirely. Garden Hills Pool at 335 Pinetree Drive is operated by a volunteer neighborhood association that took over the lease from the City of Atlanta in 1981, and its calendar is the closest thing the interior of the neighborhood has to a public clock. General summer hours run May 27 through August 1, weekdays are cleared from 1:00 to 1:15 P.M. to transition from public free swim to $5 paid admission, and the water is cleared again at 5:00 P.M. for members-only hours.
Two dates residents plan around every June:
| Date | What happens | Practical effect |
|---|---|---|
| Home Swim Meet Tuesdays (May 26, June 9) | Pool closes at 2:00 P.M. | Afternoon swim moves to Sunnybrook shade or an early Clark's reservation |
| Labor Day | Last public day of the season | After that, pool is weekends-only for members through Sept. 21 |
| Sept. 6 | End-of-Season Fall Swim Meet | Pool opens late at noon; the Cool Sharks close the summer |
The pool's annual 21+ summer party is the only night of the year the deck belongs to adults. Community Q BBQ caters. A band called Hot Larry plays. Members pay nothing, guests pay $25 at the door, and the gates close early for setup. If you have lived in Garden Hills for more than one summer, that party is on your calendar without a reminder.
The parking pattern around home meets is the other detail worth knowing. During Cool Sharks meets, Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church opens its lower lot at E. Wesley and W. Bolling, a little under half a mile west. Residents who walk from Rumson or Sheridan skip the question entirely.
Sunnybrook, Bagley, and the Post-Centennial Year
Garden Hills turned 100 in 2025. The Civic Association marked it with a Centennial Gala at the Cherokee Town Club on November 8, a family-oriented Centennial in the Streets event around Sunnybrook Park, a four-faced clock installed in a roundabout as a permanent time-stamp, and a hardcover coffee-table book documenting the homes, gardens, and civic history. That book, and the clock, and the neighborhood's centennial hangover are the reason 2026 feels less like an anniversary year and more like a demonstration year. The community that put on the gala is the same community that ran the pool concessions two months later.
Sunnybrook Park is where that continuity is easiest to see. The linear wooded park at Brentwood Drive and Brentwood Terrace is split by a creek crossed by stone bridges, and a plaque installed by the Garden Hills Women's Club in 1934 still sits at the entrance. In February 2024, more than 30 volunteers from the Civic Association and Hands On Atlanta re-mulched the pathways and pulled invasives along the creek bank, and Trees Atlanta planted 45 native trees. Those trees are now in their third summer of canopy.
Bagley Park is the counterweight. In 2022 the Buckhead Heritage Society successfully petitioned to return Frankie Allen Park to its original name, honoring the historically Black community that once stood on the land. The baseball diamonds still host Buckhead Little League. The renaming is the kind of civic detail that only reads if you know the neighborhood's layered history, which is exactly what the centennial book was written to document.
"It's like you live in a little country town, but everything in Buckhead is just minutes away."
That line belongs to Norman Davenport Askins, the classical architect who bought his first Garden Hills house in the 1970s and has designed a meaningful share of the neighborhood since. Residents who read it as a marketing tag miss the point. Askins is describing the same seam Clark's just opened onto. The interior of the neighborhood behaves like a small town. The Peachtree edge does not. Both are the address.
What This Summer Actually Looks Like If You Live Here
The week that reads best in Garden Hills right now uses both streets on purpose:
- Weekday mornings at the pool before the 1:00 transition, when the gate is still free and the lap lanes are open.
- A Tuesday early exit if it is a home-meet day, replaced by a walk under the Sunnybrook canopy or a coffee at Anis Cafe & Bistro.
- Friday farmers market at Peachtree Road Farmers Market, then an early dinner on Fellini's patio because the wait at Clark's after 7:30 is not what it will be in October.
- A late Saturday drink at the Clark's bar without a reservation, sitting under the portraits of Turner and King while the dining room turns.
- A Sunday morning stroll through the Delmont enclave off East Wesley, where Hedgewood's 32-home build sold through quickly and the 13-home Sheridan expansion by Lew Oliver is filling in across from Atlanta International School.
The move that ties it all together is refusing to treat Peachtree and Pinetree as separate neighborhoods. They share a Civic Association, a pool board, a garden club that runs the September ice cream social and the Halloween pizza party, and a centennial book that names the residents on both sides of the seam. The neighborhood works because the walk between them is short.
Clark's Steakhouse is not a shift in the neighborhood's character. It is the missing piece the Peachtree edge has been holding a lease open for since 2013, and it arrived in the same year the Civic Association finished its clock. A resident's summer here is defined by that coincidence. The steakhouse anchors the commercial front, the pool anchors the interior, and the walk between them takes less than ten minutes.
If your household is thinking about how the recent year has reshaped where the value sits inside Garden Hills, or how a home on Pinetree reads differently now than a home on Rumson, Home Luxury Real Estate works this neighborhood at the block level. Contact us to talk it through.
