It’s been a long time coming, but Vienna’s two existing Starbucks are closing down as the chain readies to open a drive-thru location a few blocks away at 367 Maple Ave E.
On Sunday, April 28, both of the Starbucks along Maple Avenue will be permanently closing.
“We would like to thank you for being a part of our store community,” Store Manager Jesus Torres said in a sign posted on the store’s front door. “You are the heart of who we are at Starbucks. It has been a great pleasure to connect with you every day. We are very thankful to have played a role in your daily routine and that you have shared these moments of your life with us.”
The new Starbucks location is planned to open Thursday, May 2.
If you absolutely, positively, cannot go four days without Starbucks, the closest nearby locations are one at 2930 Chain Bridge Road in Oakton and one at 8381 Leesburg Pike in Tysons.
Jolie Hair Studio, a new hair and beauty salon, is open for business at 121 Maple Avenue W. in Vienna.
The store officially opened a little over a month ago, on Feb. 21.
The Vienna studio is the second location for Jolie Hair Studio, which also has a salon at 10132 Colvin Run Road in Great Falls.
Services at the store range from haircuts for $30-$35 to waxing for $10-$15, along with more involved blowouts and two-hour bridal make-up sessions for $200.
In addition to hair cuts, the studio offers beauty treatments like varicose vein removal, botox treatment and nail coloring.
A grand opening celebration included a ribbon-cutting with Town of Vienna Mayor Laurie DiRocco.
Photo via Facebook
Longtime Vienna furniture retailer Posh! is departing its longtime Maple Avenue home and offering a farewell warning that the town is on the cusp of losing its small retail.
Posh! started 37 years ago with an interior design focus aimed at filling the need for high-end residential clients. Now, store owner Mary Anne Antonides is closing down the sprawling location in Vienna and says traffic, parking, and the pressures of new developments are all partially to blame.
During early afternoons, Antonides says it can take an hour just to get across town, which deters people from traveling to Vienna.
“In Vienna, we’re losing our independent stores,” Antonides said. “We lost the shops along Church Street.”
It isn’t the first time Vienna traffic has been a problem for Posh! Antonides said the store relocated off of its original Church Street location because there wasn’t enough parking to support local retail.
“When the Mill Street parking deal fell apart, that was it,” said Antonides. “Vienna is struggling with their development, and the impact for business is huge.”
More businesses are opening than closing in Vienna, but local experts warn that smaller retail locations are still being hit hard.
The move isn’t entirely driven by negative local experiences — Antonides also said she’s hoping to shift the brand from traditional retail to a more event-driven system.
With Posh! looking for a new location, Antonides says she’s hoping to reopen with a new warehouse in Merrifield and a studio in McLean where the store can showcase specialty designer items.
Finding a space in McLean that works for Posh! has also proved challenging. Antonides says the store needs a free-standing structure to be able to “create our own destiny.” In practical terms, Antonides says she wants to be able to host events that might involve putting a tent outside or other activities that wouldn’t be possible in a shared space.
But free-standing space in downtown McLean is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity as the town’s new Community Business Center aims to make the primary retail areas part of larger mixed-use developments.
Antonides also noted that many of these new mixed-use developments cater more to larger retail chains than local small businesses. She said that many of the new developments have leasing square footages that can be daunting for small businesses.
“My worry is that we’re losing our identity with artisans and small businesses,” Antonides said. “When they close, we lose connectivity and friendships.”
No specific closing date is planned, but once the Vienna location does close, Antonides says there’s a tenant currently finalizing a lease to take over the front space.
Photo via Facebook
(Updated April 12) Posh! — a high-end interior designer at 419 Maple Avenue E in Vienna — is having a closing sale.
Nearly all merchandise in the store is 20 percent off, though given the luxury implied in the store’s name, that still leaves most larger items in the store well over $1,000.
Prices in the store range from a $6,000 credenza near the front to $33 linen hand towels.
Employees at the store would not say when the store was planning to fully close, though the store remains very heavily stocked with merchandise.
A moratorium on new development applications for Maple Avenue was scheduled to expire in June but could be pushed back to October, marking over a full year of no new applications.
On the agenda for tonight’s (Monday) Vienna Town Council meeting is a request to schedule a public hearing for May 13 to discuss extending the suspension of the Maple Avenue Commercial (MAC) Zone from June 27 to Oct. 31.
Last year, the town was roiled in controversy as citizens and Council members argued back and forth over whether a new mixed-use development replacing the Vienna Wolf Trap Hotel was too large for Maple Avenue.
“If we’re going to have a project there, this one is not ready for primetime,” said Councilmember Howard Springsteen at the August meeting. “I think the developer has done a horrible [public relations] job and has created a firestorm of concerns around town. This is probably one of the most divisive things that has come to this town in 20 years.”
In September 17, the Town Council voted to suspend the MAC Zoning while town staff redesigned the town’s guidelines. The redesign process has been conducted throughout the winter and into spring. Two community workshops to solicit public feedback were held on March 29 and 30.
But the agenda item notes that staff needs more time to work on putting the suggestions from the public and Vienna officials into new guidelines:
Staff recommends extending the suspension of the MAC Zoning regulations to enable completion of proposed new design guidelines and incorporate potential recommendations from the multimodal transportation study into the amendments to the MAC Zone regulations.
The agenda item notes that a joint meeting of the Town Council, Planning Commission and Board of Architectural Review was held on March 20 but the meeting was continued to May 1.
Additionally, the Town of Vienna also recently commissioned a Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land Use Study whose results are expected to be received this summer and could be incorporated into the design guidelines.
File photo
Cake chain Nothing Bundt Cakes is hosting a very brief celebration of its 300th store opening.
From 3-3:05 p.m., stores nationwide are planning to give away up to 300 confetti “bundtlets” — little bundt cakes — for 300 seconds. The cakes are limited to one per person.
The Vienna location for Nothing Bundt Cakes opened in November at 129 Maple Avenue W.
Bundt cakes are made in a pan that gives them a distinctive ring shape. In addition to ten cake flavors and forty unique designs, Nothing Bundt Cakes also offers various cake-themed gifts and decor.
This isn’t the first free cake giveaway at the bakery. The first 50 guests at the store’s grand opening January got free bundtlets for one year.
Photo via Facebook
(Updated April 8) Despite a host of other compromises, the Sunrise Senior Living Facility and Vienna Town Council are still at odds over the project exceeding the town’s height requirements.
Both parties agreed at a work session on Monday (April 1) that there’s been compromise from Sunrise. There were modifications made to spaces on the ground floor and mezzanine and the number of proposed units was taken down from 85 to 83.
But a mezzanine that cuts just under the town’s 50-percent coverage limit for what can be considered a floor is still a sticking point for Town Council members who say the project is out of line with the town’s five-story height limit.
Jerry Liang, senior vice president of development for Sunrise, argued that Vienna should reframe its limits rather than force the building to come in under a certain height.
“There’s different ways to think about density, [like] units and square footage,” Liang said. “By setting your limits on floor and height, you’ve created the maximum box. We believe the building we designed is visually pleasing.”
Planning Commissioner Mary McCullough said there were concerns from nearby residents that the back half of the building still had a “five-story look.”
The next public hearing for the project is tentatively scheduled for April 24, when the Planning Commission will discuss the development.
“Part of our goal is to satisfy a lot of particular needs for a lot of stakeholders,” Liang said. “We’re trying to find the right balance between providing critically needed service with the cost-benefit balance to really solve that Rubik’s cube.”
Image via Town of Vienna
After some delays, Virginia Tire and Auto, at 141 Maple Ave in Vienna, is finally open for business.
The shop opened today (Thursday) and while an employee said he wasn’t aware of any grand opening celebrations planned, the store is currently in the middle of a hiring fair.
The employee said the store is looking for people to fill a variety of vacancies, from sales to technicians, and one general service manager position. The fair run until the business closes at 6 p.m. today.
While the store looks to add more people to the crew, the facility is currently operational. The shop has already had a few cars dropped off for repairs and the employee said the first oil checks and tire changes are starting today.
A new study of the Maple Avenue corridor shows Vienna’s most dangerous intersections and details extensive gaps in the town’s sidewalk network.
At an April 1 work session, the Vienna Town Council is scheduled to discuss the initial results of study by planning consulting firm Kimley-Horn.
The report also showed three major traffic crash hotspots calculated over three years: where Maple Avenue intersects with Nutley Street, Courthouse Road, and Park Street.
The study shows that while Maple Avenue has extensive sidewalk coverage, streets one block away like Windover Avenue and Glen Avenue on the west end or East Street and Mashie Drive at the east end of town are completely without sidewalks.
Church Street, another major street through the town, only has sidewalks on one side of the street between Park Street and Beulah Road.
In a finding that will surprise few Vienna residents, Maple Avenue is overcrowded. The report said daily traffic on the street topped 30,000 vehicles per day, on the high end of the study’s scale.
The street’s traffic density was worst between Nutley Street and Follin Lane, the main stretch through town.
Maple Avenue also sees high levels of bicycle traffic. It os ranked by the report at “level of traffic stress 4,” the highest category available, meaning that it is exceedingly uncomfortable and stressful for cyclists to use.
Nearly every major road feeding into the street, like Nutley Street and Park Street, as well as the aforementioned Church Street also saw high levels of car traffic and cyclist stress.
The redevelopment of 380 Maple Avenue is set for a Vienna Planning Commission review tomorrow, but whether the project will get the extra story it’s requesting remains to be determined.
The project faced pushback from members of the Vienna Town Council earlier this year when it and another Maple Avenue development seemed to be pushing the limits on what was acceptable under the town’s height limits.
The Maple Avenue Commercial zoning rules dictate that the height of buildings on Maple Avenue is limited to four stories. According to the staff report, the applicants — Red Investment LLC and MJW Maple LLC — are requesting a modification with an additional story of above-ground parking.
The application also includes a modification request for a nine-foot awning, which encroaches three feet into the front yard setback.
“Staff finds that the application meets the requirements of… the Town Code, with the exception of the requested modifications of requirements,” staff said in the report.
During work sessions with the Planning Commission and Town Council, options with the extra story and without the extra story were both presented. According to the applicants, the new parking deck would significantly increase the number of available parking spaces for retail tenants.
Photo via Town of Vienna Department of Planning and Zoning
