If you've driven past 2701 Ingersoll Avenue in the last two years, you've probably clocked the building without knowing what to call it. It replaced the Star gas station on that corner, the one that sat there for years before the lot went quiet. Anawim Housing, which now manages the affordable apartments upstairs, has described what stood there before as underused and, at times, a magnet for the kind of trouble that makes a corner feel unsettled after dark. What went up in its place is Star Lofts, a mass timber building that Iowa's zero-carbon certification program recognized as the first of its kind in the state.
Most people who noticed the ribbon-cutting back in late 2024 have probably assumed the building is done. It isn't. Nearly two years later, the four ground-floor commercial bays are still filling in one at a time, and the way that process has actually unfolded, including one very public deal that fell apart, tells you more about how Ingersoll Avenue works right now than any single opening ever could.
What's Already Filled In
Two of the four storefronts have been open for a while. Refill Market, a sustainable grocery stocked with bulk cooking and baking staples, dried fruits, legumes, oils, and spices, opened in the building in late November 2025. Zenko Tea, a bubble tea and smoothie shop, is next door. Neither made a huge splash citywide, but both gave the building its first real foot traffic and started answering the question locals had been asking since construction wrapped: what's actually going in there.
The Walk-Up Window Opening This Month
The third tenant is the one with the most name recognition outside the immediate block. Home Sweet Cone, the ice cream shop Colleen Strohmaier opened in Waukee in 2021 before expanding to West Des Moines, is opening its third location at Star Lofts this September, with a walk-up window built into roughly 1,500 square feet of the space. The building permit for the buildout was pulled back in June.
This isn't a franchise plugging into a vacant retail box. Strohmaier makes all of the shop's ice cream in a production facility next to the Waukee store, an estimated 23,000 gallons a year, and trucks it out to each location rather than making it on site. The recipe runs at 16 percent butterfat, well above the 10 percent the FDA requires to legally call something ice cream, which is part of why the shop has picked up a run of blue ribbons at the North American Ice Cream Association's convention. Strohmaier has said she loves the Ingersoll spot in particular, in part because so many of the businesses around it have been there a decade or more.
The Storefront That Keeps Changing Its Story
The fourth bay is where this gets interesting, because if you were paying attention to Des Moines dining news last fall, you probably think you already know what's supposed to be there.
In October 2025, chefs David Baruthio and Enosh Kelley signed a deal for the space and announced they were bringing back Bistro Montage, the French restaurant Kelley had originally opened on Ingersoll Avenue in 2003 and closed in 2016 after more than a decade as one of the neighborhood's most decorated dining rooms. Baruthio, who also runs Café Madeleine downtown, called the planned revival the first carbon-free emission restaurant built in Iowa, and the two chefs, both former James Beard Foundation semifinalists, talked about pop-up dinners and a wine list built around French classics. Construction started. A spring or early summer 2026 opening felt like a done deal.
It fell apart within weeks. Kelley was arrested on October 3, 2025, on charges including domestic abuse assault and three counts of contempt for violating a no-contact order, and posted a $40,000 bond tied to later contempt counts. Baruthio ended the collaboration and confirmed the restaurant would not reopen as Bistro Montage after all. He said in a statement that the project would transition to a new French concept, with a name still to come, and that it would stay in the same Star Lofts location.
As of the most recent reporting on the building's leasing, that fourth bay is still not confirmed. A July 2026 update on Home Sweet Cone's opening noted that three of the four storefronts were leased, with the developers holding a letter of intent on the last space. No name, no timeline.
Why the Empty Bay Matters More Than the Full Ones
Here's the pattern worth sitting with. A building like this doesn't fill up the way a press release makes it sound, all at once, ribbon cut, done. It fills up in fits and starts over the better part of two years, and even the tenant that generated the most excitement, a beloved restaurant coming back from the dead with two decorated chefs behind it, can collapse before a single table gets set. If you assumed Bistro Montage was quietly getting ready to reopen this year, that assumption is out of date. The space is still waiting, and whatever moves in next is going to arrive with a lot less fanfare than the deal that fell through.
That's a useful thing to know if you live nearby and have been wondering why the fourth storefront still looks dark. It's not a sign the building failed. It's a sign that filling four bays in a mixed-use building, especially one built as intentionally as this one, takes longer and involves more false starts than the announcements ever let on.
The Rest of the Block Is Moving Too
Star Lofts isn't the only thing changing on this stretch of Ingersoll. The building got its own mural this year, "Rainbow Dancing Stars" by artists Cat Rocketship and Dani Awesome, painted with support from Invest DSM and Wells Fargo grants as part of the corridor's Art on the Avenues week. A few blocks down at Vogue Vision, a second new mural called "History Has Eyes on You," by Mollie Wallace, went up around the same time.
The Avenues of Ingersoll & Grand, the nonprofit that runs the district, held its Ingersoll LIVE block party in August, with live music and food along the street the group still calls Restaurant Row. If you're planning ahead, Beggars Night on Ingersoll Avenue falls on October 30 this year. The corridor's long-running streetscape project, the one that's brought raised bike lanes and reworked parking over the last several years, has a fifth phase between 31st and 35th Streets that the city selected a contractor for last fall, with construction targeted for this year.
None of this is one story. It's several small ones running at the same time on the same half-mile of street, which is a pretty accurate description of how a neighborhood actually changes. Not with one groundbreaking, but with an ice cream window going in this month, a grocery store that's already found its regulars, a mural that gives a building its first splash of color, and one empty storefront that's still figuring out what it's going to be.
If you're the kind of person who keeps half an eye on what's happening in your own neighborhood, that empty bay at 2701 Ingersoll is worth watching. Whatever goes in there next won't need an ice cream truck or a James Beard nomination to matter. It just needs to open.
Marc and Jill Lee spend as much time tracking what's changing on the ground in Des Moines and its western suburbs as they do tracking the market itself, because the two are rarely separate stories. If you're weighing a move to a neighborhood like this one and want someone who already knows which corners are still filling in, reach out to Marc & Jill Lee. Get Moving With Marc & Jill Lee.
