Drive west on Beverley Street past Grubert Avenue and the fence is gone. For two years it wrapped a chunk of the old Chestnut Hills Shopping Center, the block everyone in the West End still calls the Big Lots lot even though Big Lots left in 2016. Now there's a two-story brick building where the fence used to be, fresh striping on the road, and a bike lane that didn't exist before. It looks finished.
Most of the lot behind it is still grass.
The courthouse is one completed part of the West Beverley Street project; plans for the rest of the site are still in development.
What Actually Got Built
The piece that's done is the Staunton Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, a 34,330-square-foot building at 2020 West Beverley Street. The city closed on the Chestnut Hills property in August 2023, broke ground in April 2024, and cut the ribbon on December 19, 2025, with the courthouse opening for its first day of business four days earlier.
The number attached to the project grew along the way. The construction contract awarded to Howard Shockey & Sons in 2024 was $18.8 million. By completion, the total project cost was reported at $24.7 million. Some of that gap traces back to a mid-2024 decision: the original plan preserved a few of the older shopping center buildings for future city use, but once crews got a closer look, those buildings were in worse shape than expected, and demolishing everything on the site instead added roughly $125,000 to the budget.
Mayor Michele Edwards spoke at the ribbon cutting about what the building is meant to signal for the neighborhood around it, according to Augusta Free Press.
"Today marks an exciting day for the West End. This is a tangible commitment to the revitalization of our West End neighborhoods. We are thrilled to open these doors and see this area continue to thrive around it."
The building is a modern facility with two courtrooms, secure space for the sheriff's office, the clerk's office, and the court service unit, on land that used to be an empty retail center. The quote’s hope that the area will continue to thrive is about the neighborhood around the courthouse, not just the new building itself.
The Rest of the Lot
Chestnut Hills Shopping Center, before the city bought it, covered roughly 88,478 square feet of retail space across a single parcel on West Beverley. The courthouse occupies a fraction of that footprint. Everything else on the property, including the buildings the city originally hoped to keep, came down in the 2024 demolition.
According to the city's own project page, that's still an open question. Staunton says work is "currently underway with a consultant to develop a conceptual design for the future use of the surrounding property," tied to the longer-term vision for the West Beverley corridor. There's no timeline attached to that yet. No renderings, no announced tenant, no groundbreaking date. Just a courthouse standing on part of a lot that used to hold a Big Lots, a Family Dollar, and a scattering of smaller retail spaces, with the rest of the acreage waiting on a plan that hasn't been finalized.
Here's the sequence, in order:
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| August 2023 | City closes on Chestnut Hills Shopping Center |
| April 2024 | Groundbreaking on courthouse construction |
| June 2024 | City decides to demolish all remaining buildings, adding $125,000 |
| December 15, 2025 | Courthouse opens for first day of business |
| December 19, 2025 | Formal ribbon-cutting ceremony |
| Now | Conceptual design work underway for the rest of the site |
If you've been watching the fence come down and assumed the whole project wrapped up in December, the courthouse is real and the rest of it is still a study.
The Street Changed Too
While the courthouse went up, the street in front of it got rebuilt. The West Beverley Street sidewalk and repaving project started in fall 2024 and covered 18 pedestrian intersections, about 600 feet of new sidewalk heading west from Grubert Avenue, and a full repaving from Grubert Avenue to the western city limits. Funding came from VDOT's State of Good Repair program, the city, and Community Development Block Grant money through HUD.
The bigger change is the bike lane, because West Beverley didn't have one before. City planner Susan Wilson put it plainly at a community meeting held to walk residents through the new markings, as reported by Augusta Free Press: "West Beverley is our city's very first bike lane." Concrete sidewalk work finished by the end of 2024. Striping and signage followed into spring 2025, with the last pieces, including bike-friendly storm grates, holding up final markings until they were installed.
The tradeoff that came with it was the center turn lane near the Enterprise Centre and Food Lion, which the redesign eliminated. Some residents raised concerns about that when the change was proposed. City engagement staff pointed to traffic studies showing the roadway could handle it, and later data backed that up: West Beverley carries between 4,700 and 7,400 average daily trips, well under Churchville Avenue's 7,400 to 9,700, which got its own bike lane treatment along a 2.6-mile stretch around the same period.
What Filled In Around It
The courthouse project didn't bring new restaurants to its own parcel, but the blocks around it picked up a few. West Beverley Restaurant opened August 8, 2024, at 2207 West Beverley Street, in the building that used to be a Tastee Freeze before it closed during the pandemic. It's owned by D. Patel and managed by her husband Harry Patel, who moved to Virginia from Gujarat, India, eight years before opening their first business venture. The burger and hot dog spot sits within walking distance of two longer-running West End anchors, Mi Rancho Mexican Restaurant and Stella Mia Pizzeria, both of which now share a parking lot with the new court building.
A little further along, KIM brought a combination of Thai, Singaporean, and Korean dishes to the West End, adding another option to a stretch of Beverley Street that's slowly filling in around the empty lot rather than on it.
What's changed in the West End over the past two years:
- A finished courthouse replacing a vacant shopping center
- The city's first bike lane, running the length of West Beverley
- Rebuilt sidewalks at 18 intersections
- New restaurants filling gaps in existing storefronts, not the courthouse parcel itself
- A still-undetermined future for most of the old shopping center land
What to Watch For
The conceptual design work for the rest of the Chestnut Hills site is the piece with no public timeline yet. Everything else on this list has a date attached to it: a groundbreaking, a ribbon cutting, a striping schedule. This one doesn't, which makes it the thing worth checking on periodically rather than assuming it's already decided.
The city's stated reasoning for buying the site in the first place was that a public investment here would function as what officials called an economic catalyst, something that would pull private development along with it. The courthouse is built. Future development on the rest of the site remains to be determined.
If you're curious about what a changing corridor like this means for property values or timing in the West End, the team at Nest Realty - Shenandoah Valley tracks these updates as part of knowing the neighborhood, not just the listings in it.
