What's New Around Downtown Powell This Late Summer
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
For years, downtown Powell functioned as a pass-through. You picked up coffee, ducked into a boutique, then drove home to a subdivision that had its own errands to run. That version of downtown is quietly ending. The four blocks around the Liberty and Olentangy intersection have added a coworking campus with a rooftop bar, a donut shop, a multinational restaurant, a proposed boutique hotel, and a new-build residential pocket, all in the past year. Weekly rhythms have started to layer on top of the storefronts.
If you already live in Powell, this is the piece that explains why traffic on Olentangy Street feels different this summer and what to actually do with your Saturdays.
The biggest shift is at 50 and 60 East Olentangy. Construction on COhatch's new coworking and event space in downtown Powell wrapped this year, with the location on track to open in early-to-mid March in a 13,900-square-foot development that includes coworking areas, private offices, meeting rooms and event venues. That footprint alone is more programmed square footage than any single downtown Powell building has ever held.
Two pieces of the campus matter for residents who never plan to buy a coworking membership:
The public rooftop is the part locals should track. Downtown Powell has never had elevated outdoor seating with a full bar program. That single amenity changes the calculus on where you take out-of-town guests on a Friday.
City officials expect the ripple effect to be measurable. The COhatch development is expected to create nearly 200 jobs and generate about $1.5 million annually in payroll once fully operational. Those are daytime workers who need lunch, coffee, and after-work drinks within a two-block radius, which is precisely what the rest of this list is starting to supply.
Two full-service concepts opened downtown within four months of each other, both on the same two-street axis.
Glazed Over, 240 N. Liberty Street. Glazed Over announced in a Facebook post that their new location opened on February 26th. The new location is inside Liberty Plaza at 240 N. Liberty St. in Powell, Ohio, open from 6:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Every donut is hand-rolled and hand-cut in small batches throughout the day, and the brand originally opened in Sandusky, Ohio in 2019. A morning-only shop that closes at one is a specific bet: it captures the Saturday farmers market crowd across the parking lot and skips the dinner competition entirely.
CoccoKay Bites, 170 W. Olentangy Street. The historic Downtown area in Powell has another restaurant option with CoccoKay Bites at 170 W. Olentangy Street, a business founded by husband-and-wife team Bala and Priya Somakandan that features food and drink options from India and Sri Lanka as well as other European and Asian cuisines. Menu items include biriyani, Indo-Chinese fried rice dishes, Indian street foods, European cakes and desserts, a large selection of bubble teas and a signature offering: a four-foot-long dosa, designed for sharing. The restaurant opened Wednesday, June 10th.
A four-foot dosa is not filler detail. It is the sort of dish that turns a restaurant into a destination pin for people driving up from Dublin and Worthington, which is a category of visitor Powell has historically exported rather than imported.
The pipeline behind these openings is deeper than most residents realize. A second Indian concept has already announced. Powell is getting a new edition in 2026 with Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar announcing plans for a new location, promising traditional recipes, a contemporary vibe, and elevated hospitality. The new Powell spot promises refined dishes, handcrafted cocktails, and an upscale yet inviting space, building on the success of its Bexley location.
The larger swing is a boutique hotel on the same block as CoccoKay.
Transform Construction has submitted plans for a two-story restaurant at 147 W. Olentangy St. and a three-story building at 173 W. Olentangy St. that would house another restaurant, retail space, and a 16-room boutique hotel. The combined investment totals about $7.8 million.
City officials are weighing 75% property tax abatements over 15 years for both sites, under which the developer would save about $190,000 on the restaurant project and roughly $1.5 million on the hotel building. The economic-impact math the city is using is instructive. The development team estimates the hotel could generate roughly $1.9 million in annual visitor spending if fully occupied year-round, based on the Ohio Department of Development's average that an overnight visitor typically spends about $327 per day, which would amount to $28.7 million in economic activity over 15 years. Two dining spaces are attached to the project. "Quite simply, it's because our residents want them," the city's economic development administrator told the council committee when asked why more restaurants.
Residential density is filling in alongside the commercial pipeline. Grand Communities, a subsidiary of Fischer Homes, is building 19 single-family homes off of Depot Street next to Nocterra Brewing Co. Named "Encore Park," the development will feature two-story homes from Fischer's Uptown Collection which can span up to more than 3,000 square feet with five bedrooms. Nineteen households a short walk from a brewery, a coworking rooftop, and a Saturday farmers market is a materially different living pattern than a Powell subdivision three miles out.
The other thing that has changed is that downtown Powell now runs on a weekly clock. If you moved here five years ago, this is the part that will feel new.
Saturday morning. Powell Farmers Market runs Saturdays, May 23 through Oct. 3, from 9 a.m. to noon at 240 N. Liberty St., Powell. Same parking lot as Glazed Over, which is not an accident.
Saturday morning, alternate use. Powell Parks and Recreation is partnering with Body Alive Powell to offer free Pilates In The Park, meeting Saturday, July 18th and Saturday, August 15th at 8:30am at Village Green Park (47 Hall Street) for a free 45 minute mat Pilates class. Bring a mat, H20 and your friends.
Thursday evening. The Nocterra Run Club meets every Thursday at 6:15pm for a healthy run, followed by a hangout in the taproom or beer garden, working with Columbus Running Company and incorporating all levels of ability, pace, or distance. It's a great way to meet friends with similar goals and interests, and it meets year-round.
Full weekend. Mark your calendar for Sunday, September 13, 2026, from 9:00 AM–4:00 PM for the Powell Street Market & Business Expo, a day of strolling the streets of downtown Powell while shopping from 60+ local vendors, enjoying food trucks, and exploring local businesses, restaurants, and bars.
Four regular touchpoints, all inside a five-minute walk of each other, most of them free. That is the definition of a functioning downtown, and it did not exist here in this form two summers ago.
The obvious frame is that downtown Powell is getting nicer, and it is. The more interesting frame is that the center of gravity in Powell is moving.
For a long time, the highest-value residential streets in Powell traded on distance from the crossroads: acreage in Wedgewood, cul-de-sac privacy off Sawmill Parkway, established backyards in older Olentangy pockets. Walkability was a bonus, not the pitch. When a downtown adds a public rooftop bar, a hotel proposal, a coworking campus that brings 200 daytime workers, and a run club that ends at a taproom, the homes with a short walk to Olentangy Street start telling a different story to a buyer than they did before. That story is not about square footage. It is about not needing a second car to have a full weekend.
City officials have been explicit about where they see the next wave. Officials have identified the Home Road and Sawmill Parkway corridors as critical for future revenue generation, and entitlement risk is low for projects aligned with these corridors, though downtown development remains subject to extreme aesthetic and parking scrutiny. In plain terms: the city intends to keep downtown small and curated while pushing commercial scale outward to Sawmill and Home. That constraint is what makes a downtown Powell address a genuinely finite thing, and it is the mechanism that will separate the next decade of Powell values from the last one.
Powell rewards owners who understand how the town is changing at the block level, not just at the ZIP code level. Whether you are watching what Encore Park does to Depot Street pricing, weighing what the boutique hotel proposal means for a nearby home's future resale, or simply trying to decide whether now is the moment to list, Guided Property Sales can walk you through where your home fits in the current Powell market and how to position it for the buyers this new downtown is starting to attract.
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