The Two Downtowns Taking Shape in Post Falls Right Now

Drive east on Fourth Avenue past the roundabout at Idaho Road and you pass a 151-room hotel that did not exist a year ago. Keep going toward Spokane Street and you pass a construction fence around a four-story building going up directly across from City Hall. A block south, a second job site sits behind temporary fencing near the Handy Mart block, quiet for months and now moving again. If you have lived through this stretch of growth in Post Falls, you have probably assumed it is all one project with one name attached to it. It is not. It is two separate development efforts, run by two different companies, that happen to be finishing on the same four blocks at close to the same time.

A master plan and an accumulation, four blocks apart

The larger of the two is Millworx, the 50-acre redevelopment of the old Idaho Veneer Co. mill site led by Spokane-based A&A Construction & Development. The company has put the eventual build-out at $150 million to $200 million, with plans for 685 residential units and 104,000 square feet of commercial space arranged around a walkable core centered on the Fourth Avenue and North Idaho Road roundabout. By March 2025, the project had already delivered more than 200 residential units, including North Yards, where 68 apartments sit above ground-floor commercial space and second-floor resident amenities across two connected buildings. This past December, Hyatt Place Post Falls / Coeur d'Alene opened inside Millworx at 1213 E. Fourth Ave, the first Hyatt-branded property in North Idaho. The hotel came with 151 rooms, underground parking, an indoor pool, roughly 2,200 square feet of meeting space, and two in-house dining concepts called The Market and The Bar, along with about 30 new jobs. Piccolo Pizza, a sister location to a longtime Liberty Lake pizzeria whose owning family also runs Hayj's Bistro, opened in Millworx's Silo Block alongside Shift Fitness.

The second effort has no single name and no single developer behind it. It is a string of individually owned buildings along Spokane Street, a few blocks south of Millworx, that keep showing up with the same architecture firm attached. HDG Architecture designed the interior for Konala when the gluten-free bowl shop opened its first location on Spokane Street in May 2023. HDG is also behind Nonna, the 50,000-square-foot mixed-use building rising at Fourth and Spokane directly across from Post Falls City Hall, and Rooted Social House, a coffee-and-entertainment venue under construction a block away. Announcing Rooted, the firm said the project continues its commitment to "shaping a walkable, character-rich district." That is not a line added after the fact for a press release. It is the same stated intent showing up on three separate building permits within six blocks, each commissioned independently by the property owner rather than dictated by one master plan.

What is already open

If you want to walk into something finished tonight, here is what exists on the ground right now:

• Piccolo Pizza, in the Millworx Silo Block
• Konala, on Spokane Street, the original location of what has become a fast-growing regional chain
• Terre Coffee & Bakery, 621 N Spokane St, drive-thru and sit-down
• Republic Kitchen + Taphouse, adjacent to the site where Nonna is rising
• Hyatt Place Post Falls / Coeur d'Alene, 1213 E. Fourth Ave, with The Market and The Bar open to the public

What is still under construction

The two projects closest to completion sit almost across the street from each other, and their footprints tell you something about who is building them.

Nonna is owned by mother-daughter team Laura and Kelsey Horn, who held the site for years while working through soil remediation before construction could begin. Their brunch restaurant, Miss Dazee's, will occupy roughly 3,000 square feet of the ground floor. Post Falls Community Development Director Bob Seale called the site "a key property in revitalization of the downtown" when the project was first announced. HDG has since described the finished building as designed to be a cornerstone of the city's growing urban core.

Rooted Social House broke ground again last December after what its architects described only as a period of pause. It is planned as a two-purpose space, a coffee stop by morning and a social destination later in the day. No completion date has been released, which means it is the one piece of this corridor still genuinely unpredictable.

The bowl shop that outgrew its own street

Konala is worth a longer look, because it is the clearest evidence that this stretch of Spokane Street is producing more than lunch options. Trace and Jammie Miller opened the first Konala there in May 2023, with HDG designing an interior built around natural light and an open kitchen so customers could watch food being prepared. The concept, protein-forward bowls with macros printed on the menu, caught on quickly. A Coeur d'Alene location followed in August 2024. A North Spokane location opened in late January 2025 and reportedly served over 1,000 customers on its first day, according to the founders. By spring 2026, Konala had sold more than 50 franchise agreements and was preparing new locations in Spokane Valley, near Gonzaga University in central Spokane, and as far away as Provo, Utah, and Belleville, New Jersey, with a stated goal of 1,000 locations over the next decade through a partnership with franchise developer Fransmart.

The company's roots are still on Spokane Street, three years and one architecture firm removed from a chain now planning to cross state lines.

What this means if you live nearby

By the time Nonna's mid-October target arrives, the four blocks between the Millworx roundabout and Post Falls City Hall will look different than they did a year ago, whether or not Rooted Social House has an opening date by then. What used to be a stretch anchored by one taphouse and a handful of older storefronts is turning into a corridor where a hotel, the birthplace of a chain headed toward a thousand locations, a brunch restaurant, and a still-unnamed evening venue will all sit within a five-minute walk of each other. None of that happened because one company drew a master plan for the whole street. It happened because a large developer built outward from a roundabout while a design firm kept getting repeat calls from independent owners a few blocks away, and both are landing at close to the same time.

If you already live in Post Falls, the next couple of months are worth watching in person. Miss Dazee's and Rooted Social House both still need firm opening dates, and whichever one seats its first customer first will probably set the tone for how this stretch of Spokane Street gets talked about for the next few years.

Chris Briner and the team at Briner Properties track changes like this across Post Falls, Hayden, Coeur d'Alene, and the rest of Kootenai County, because what happens on a corridor like Spokane Street shapes what a home nearby is worth long before it shows up in a listing description. If you are curious what growth like this means for your own property, get your instant home valuation and see where things stand today.