"We want you to walk in and feel like that pharmacy has been in there forever."
That's Autumn Oser, the design principal behind Haldon House, describing the new home planned for Gladwyne Pharmacy inside the old Gladwyne Market building at 357 Righters Mill Road. It's a good line, and it points at something most residents following this story secondhand have gotten backward. The building everyone actually recognizes, the one that's housed the pharmacy and Homeroom for years, is the one coming down. The building getting dressed up to feel like it's "always been there" is a different one entirely, a hair salon that closed last fall.
If you live in Gladwyne, you already know the outline. Andre Golsorkhi and his wife Autumn Oser, the couple behind Haldon House, are working with Jeff and Janine Yass to remake the village center at the intersection of Youngs Ford and Righters Mill Roads. What's changed since Golsorkhi first stood in front of a packed auditorium at Gladwyne Elementary in January is where every piece actually lands, and the plan has moved since then in ways that are worth untangling building by building.
The Building Coming Down Is the One You Know
The Village Shoppes at 358 Righters Mill Road currently house Gladwyne Pharmacy and Homeroom, the daytime café run by chef Henry Morgan. Under the revised plan presented to the Gladwyne Civic Association on May 18, that building comes down entirely. In its place: a new structure the team calls "the barn," styled after farm buildings in Lower Merion and Lancaster County, with an expanded Homeroom filling the whole first floor and office or event space upstairs.
This is the part that sits oddly next to the project's own language about preservation. The building slated for demolition is the one that's actually old. What replaces it will be new construction designed to read as if it's always belonged there, the same design instinct Haldon House is applying two doors down.
The Pharmacy Isn't Closing. It's Swapping Addresses.
Here's the piece that got lost between the January headlines and now. Gladwyne Market, the grocery store at 357 Righters Mill Road, shut down last year after Haldon House bought the building for $5 million. Under the original January concept, that Market building was slated to become the village's new restaurant. Under the May revision, it doesn't. The Market building becomes the pharmacy's new, larger home instead, and the restaurant moves to the former OMG Salon space at 351 Righters Mill Road, the smaller building the developers have leased rather than bought outright.
OMG Salon closed for its own reasons that have nothing to do with square footage. Owner Maurice Tenenbaum has said his rent more than doubled last fall, which is what forced him out in the first place. That building was once a general store, and Haldon House wants the new restaurant to lean into that history rather than import a trend from Philadelphia. It's still unnamed as of the May meeting, but the team has described it as a "community watering hole," a phrase worth sitting with given that Gladwyne's only existing full-service restaurant, the Union League's Guard House, has been closed to public dining for nearly a decade.
So the net shift: pharmacy grows into the bigger, more central building. Restaurant lands in the smaller, formerly residential-scale one. Homeroom gets a new purpose-built home. That's a meaningfully different map than the one Golsorkhi described in January, when a slate of new retailers was still on the table.
What's Confirmed, as of the Last Public Update
The most recent detailed account came out of the May 18 civic association meeting and follow-up reporting from the Philadelphia Inquirer in late May and mid-June. As of that update, the plan centers on five pieces:
- Gladwyne Pharmacy relocates and expands into the former Gladwyne Market building at 357 Righters Mill Road
- A still-unnamed restaurant takes the former OMG Salon space at 351 Righters Mill Road
- Homeroom gets a new, larger, purpose-built home in a "barn" structure replacing the current Village Shoppes building
- A public green space goes in between Homeroom and the library, with a gazebo, native plantings, and a small amphitheater intended for outdoor classes and library events
- A parking lot replaces a residential property on the 900 block of Youngs Ford Road
That last item is the one still unresolved, and it's the one most likely to determine how any of this actually feels to live near.
The Piece Nobody's Approved Yet
Turning a house into a parking lot in Lower Merion Township isn't something a developer can do by right. Most of what Haldon House has proposed, cleaning up landscaping, refurbishing storefronts, bringing in new tenants, is allowed under Gladwyne's "neighborhood center" zoning designation, a category the township put on the books in 2023 specifically for small-scale commercial buildings and local retail. That's why so much of this project has moved forward without a public township vote. Demolishing a house and paving it, on the other hand, requires a zoning amendment and a vote from the Board of Commissioners, according to Inquirer reporting from Lower Merion's building and planning director, Chris Leswing.
That's the approval nobody's gotten yet, and it's also the one closest to home for the people who'd actually be living next to it. Ron Weiner and Jane Stringer, who live in an adjoining Youngs Ford Place townhome, told the developers directly at the May meeting that a tree-buffered lot on their property line would still cost them the privacy and residential feel they've had for decades. Another neighbor, Rosemarie Leddy, raised a more practical question: whether the proposed lot even holds enough cars for Homeroom, the new restaurant, the green space, and the pharmacy all drawing traffic at once.
Golsorkhi has said a traffic study is in progress. Several residents pushed back on the timing, pointing out that a count taken between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when the village empties out for the summer, wouldn't reflect the crowds that show up the rest of the year.
The Wires Are Staying Up, for Now
One piece from January hasn't reappeared in any recent update. The original concept included burying the overhead utility wires that cross above the OMG building and the rest of the village center, both for looks and because they've been blamed for outages. As of the May meeting, Golsorkhi confirmed the team has cost estimates for the work but that it's currently "on the shelf" while the rest of the planning continues. If you've been waiting to see that intersection without wires overhead, that's not part of the current version.
As of the June update, the reconfigured plan hadn't yet been formally submitted to Lower Merion Township, meaning the sequence ahead still runs through Historic Architectural Review Board input, additional civic association meetings, and eventually a Board of Commissioners vote on the parking piece. Greg Prichard, the township's historic preservation planner, has said the project will involve multiple review boards before the commissioners give any final sign-off.
What It Means for a Tuesday Afternoon
None of this changes overnight, and the version taking shape now is smaller and less commercial than the one Golsorkhi described back in January, largely because residents told the team directly they wanted the village to keep its "quirk" rather than become something more polished. What it does mean, eventually, is that the walk from the library to lunch will run past a green space instead of a parking strip, the pharmacy counter will sit in a bigger room with a wraparound porch, and the closest thing to a real sit-down dinner in the village will finally exist somewhere other than a members-only dining room. Where everyone parks to get there is still the open question.
If you're watching this play out because you're weighing whether Gladwyne's village center is heading somewhere you'd want to be near for the next decade, or you're trying to make sense of what a project like this means for a specific street or a specific house, that's the kind of question the Damon Michels Team fields regularly from people who already call the Main Line home. Reach out anytime you want a local, informed take on what's happening in your corner of it.
