Montana Bellagamba grew up in Barrington. This summer she opened a bookstore in it.
Bell House Books sits at 200 Applebee St., Suite 117, inside the Ice House Mall, and its owner is not a national retailer testing the northwest suburbs. She is a hometown resident who saw a gap on Applebee Street and filled it herself. A Daily Herald profile in June described the shop as one woman's effort at
"bringing her passion for books to the town where she grew up."
That detail matters more than it first appears, because it is the same pattern showing up across downtown Barrington right now. A needlepoint shop. A sandwich shop moving deeper into the village core. A food truck getting its first-ever storefront. Meanwhile, three blocks away, a stalled 1990s redevelopment site is finally about to break ground on 125 residential units and a rear lot of car condos. Downtown Barrington isn't growing in one direction this summer. It's growing at two completely different scales at the same time, and understanding which one you're standing in front of tells you something about what this village is actually becoming.
The small storefronts filling in
Walk the blocks around the Ice House Mall this summer and you'll notice the openings share a size, not just a season. According to the Village of Barrington's own development tracker, here's what's landed or is about to:
- Bell House Books, a woman-owned independent bookstore, now open in the Ice House Mall on Applebee Street.
- The Pepper Pot, a needlepoint shop and lounge in the Ice House Mall that also hosts mahjong classes, open play, and leagues.
- Fix Sandwich Shop, relocating to 113 S. Cook Street, described by the village as featuring homemade bread and Italian street sandwiches.
- Kurbside Pizza, a familiar area food truck opening its first brick-and-mortar location, with interior construction expected to begin shortly.
- Taco Maya, opening its 12th location this summer, a regional fast-casual Mexican concept rather than a first-time operator.
- Bundle, an East Asian dumpling, noodle, and bubble tea concept opening in the Shops of Flint Creek in summer 2026, with interior construction already underway (a separate retail node from the downtown core, worth noting if you're mapping this by foot).
None of these are big-box tenants. None required a national real estate committee to sign off. A bookstore, a needlepoint lounge, a sandwich shop, and a food truck's first storefront are the kind of businesses that exist because one or two people decided to bet on a specific block. Taco Maya is the outlier in scale, a growing regional chain rather than a solo operator, but even at 12 locations it's still a fast-casual storefront, not a redevelopment.
This is what "filling in" looks like at human scale. It's also, on its own, not the whole story.
Three blocks away, a different kind of bet
The site locals have called the "Golden Triangle" for decades sits bound by Metra tracks to the south, Canadian National tracks to the north, and Hough Street to the east, a genuinely triangular parcel that has shown up in the village's redevelopment planning as far back as the 1990s. It has outlasted multiple development cycles without a shovel going into the ground.
That changes this year. Local developer Joe Taylor of Compass Point Development is behind a project the village says will bring 125 residential units, more than 12,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space, and 37 car condominiums, described as luxury vehicle storage paired with personal recreational space at the rear of the site. Construction is scheduled to begin in late fall 2026.
Set that next to the Bell House Books opening and the contrast is the point. One is a single owner converting a small retail bay. The other is a multi-decade redevelopment site finally attracting the kind of institutional capital and multi-year construction timeline that a bookstore or sandwich shop never needs. Both are real growth. They are not the same growth, and a downtown that can absorb both at once, in the same season, is telling you something about its underlying demand that a single restaurant opening never could.
The sidewalks are under construction because of both
If you've found detours around Park Avenue this summer, that's not incidental to any of this. The village restarted construction on the northwest section of Park Avenue on July 14, 2026, part of what officials are calling Phase 3 of a broader streetscape project. The scope includes paver removal and new concrete sidewalks on that stretch and part of East Station Street, an expanded outdoor dining footprint for the restaurants already there, and landscaping with clay brick banding.
Layered on top of that, the village is finalizing design plans for a new community gathering space on Park Avenue that would convert a section of roadway into a plaza built for outdoor gatherings and additional patio dining. That project is anticipated to begin construction sometime between fall 2026 and spring 2027.
Read those two threads together and the public investment makes more sense. A village doesn't widen its outdoor dining capacity and carve out new plaza space to serve six new small storefronts. It does that when it's also preparing sidewalks and public space to absorb 125 new households and their foot traffic arriving from a project three blocks away. The streetscape work is the connective tissue between the small bets and the big one, infrastructure sized for both scales at once.
A building that's done this before
There's a detail about the Ice House Mall itself worth sitting with. The building that now houses Bell House Books and The Pepper Pot wasn't built as a shopping destination. It started in 1904 as a dairy and ice operation, later converted into a boutique retail mall decades after its original industrial purpose ended. Downtown Barrington's small-business layer has a long habit of reusing old bones for new purposes rather than building new. The Golden Triangle site, by contrast, has sat undeveloped precisely because it required new construction from the ground up rather than adaptive reuse, which is a large part of why it took thirty years to attract a developer willing to do it.
That's the pattern underneath everything happening downtown this summer. The small-scale growth moves fast because it reuses what's already standing. The large-scale growth moves slowly because it has to build from nothing. Both are finally happening in the same three blocks at the same time, which is not something you'd guess from any single storefront opening on its own.
What this looks like from the street
If you live in Barrington and you've noticed a new bookstore, a construction detour on Park Avenue, and a fenced lot near the Metra tracks all at once this summer, you're not imagining a busy season. You're watching a downtown place two different kinds of bets simultaneously: individual owners betting on small, reused storefronts, and a developer betting on more than a decade of patient assembly finally paying off on a triangular lot nobody else wanted to touch. The village's own streetscape spending suggests it expects both bets to pay off at the same time, which is a more specific claim than "downtown is growing," and one worth knowing if you're paying attention to what your own property sits near.
If you're curious how any of this, from a new bookstore on Applebee Street to 125 units landing on the old Golden Triangle site, might affect what a home in downtown Barrington is actually worth right now, that's exactly the kind of block-by-block read Morrison Home Team tracks for clients throughout the year. Request Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see where your property stands against what's changing around it.