For most of 2025, if you drove the loop that defines daily life in Starmount Forest, you'd pass three dark storefronts and one silent golf course. The fairways behind the club were fenced off and torn up. The old Food World building on West Market sat empty, the kind of empty that makes you wonder if anything is ever going in there. And over on the other side of Friendly Avenue, the post office space and the old NY & Co. spot at Friendly Center sat vacant too, waiting.
None of that happened by accident, and none of it happened in isolation. Starmount Forest Country Club closed its course on purpose to rebuild it. Crunch Fitness picked that particular grocery shell on purpose because it was empty and it was on West Market. CBL Properties held those Friendly Center spaces on purpose while it lined up replacement tenants. Three separate decisions, three separate companies, and somehow all three landed in the same few months of late 2025 into early 2026.
That timing is the actual story here. Not that a gym opened, or a restaurant opened, or a golf course got new grass. It's that the neighborhood's three biggest amenity anchors went quiet and came back loud within roughly the same season, which means the version of Starmount Forest you're used to describing to houseguests is already a year out of date.
The Golf Course Went Dark On Purpose
Starmount Forest Country Club has been sitting on its 155 acres off West Market since 1930, back when it co-hosted the Greater Greensboro Open, the tournament that eventually became the Wyndham Championship. Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Arnold Palmer all played that course. In 1947 it hosted the first stroke-play event of the U.S. Women's Open, won by LPGA founder Betty Jameson. That history is real, but it's also the kind of fact every neighborhood write-up already leads with. What's new is what happened to the ground itself.
In December 2024, the club shut the course down entirely and brought in Kris Spence, a Greensboro-based golf architect who specializes in restoring classic layouts, to rebuild it. The goal wasn't modernization. It was the opposite: Spence spent the project trying to make the course feel like it did in 1930, before a 1970 update by George Cobb and a 1999 rebuild by Lester George had pulled it toward a more generic style.
"It's a new day at Starmount, for sure."
That's Spence, describing the finished product once play resumed. The specifics back it up. Greens were converted to Ultradwarf TifEagle bermudagrass, fairways and roughs to TifTuf Bermuda, tees to Zeon Zoysia. On the par-3 eighth, trees came out entirely, which means the hole is now visible from Holden Road in a way it hasn't been in decades. On the signature par-5 seventh, which runs along Starmount Drive near Holden, three fairway bunkers came out on the left and a new one went in for long hitters, tightening the whole approach.
The course reopened for a grand reopening in the fall of 2025. The club's site also lists four new outdoor pickleball courts as part of the same round of improvements, a first for a property that's spent nearly a century defined by golf and clay tennis. Whether or not you play, the practical change for a Starmount Forest resident is this: the course you drive past on your way to West Market looks different now, in ways you can actually see from the road, and it's the first real change to that ground in over 25 years.
The Food World Building Didn't Stay Empty Long
While the course was torn up, the old Food World grocery building at 3950 West Market Street sat vacant. It's a familiar kind of empty, a big-box shell that's been through a couple of prior lives and was starting to feel permanent.
It wasn't. On January 5, 2026, Crunch Fitness opened its first Triad-area location there, a 45,000-square-foot gym operated by franchisee JF Fitness. It's not a small satellite location either. The general manager, Steve Greene, told the News & Record the gym was built to serve people at every level, from someone's first day in a gym to members who've been at it for twenty or thirty years. The build includes hydromassage beds, tanning, a sauna, and full locker rooms, plus the standard mix of strength equipment and group classes.
The location matters more than the amenity list. West Market Street near Holden Road is the same corridor that runs along the back of the golf course. For years, anyone in Starmount Forest who wanted a serious gym was driving to Friendly Center or further. Now there's a 45,000-square-foot option a few minutes from home, in a building that had been sitting empty long enough that most people had stopped expecting anything to happen there.
Friendly Center Filled Three Empty Spaces at Once
Friendly Center has always been the retail anchor on the other side of Friendly Avenue from Starmount Forest, the place with the movie theater, the Apple Store, and Green Valley Grill. What changed in 2025 is how many long-vacant spaces there got filled at once.
| New tenant | Former space | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Cooper's Hawk Winery & Restaurant | Former NY & Co. | 10,000 sq ft |
| North Italia | Former post office | Roughly 6,000 sq ft |
| First Watch | Former Qdoba | 4,000 sq ft |
| Tous les Jours (French bakery) | New space in The Shops | Not disclosed |
CBL Properties, which owns the center, announced all four in April 2025 and had them targeted to open by the end of that year. Cooper's Hawk brought a Napa-style tasting room and a full private dining room to the old NY & Co. footprint. North Italia took over the post office space, which had sat empty long enough that a local shopper told a WFMY reporter the whole strip finally got the face lift it needed. The center also added LEGO and a piercing studio called Rowan around the same stretch, drawing a reported 1,200 people to the LEGO store's opening day alone.
None of these are surprising as individual openings. Shopping centers add tenants constantly. What's notable is that three specific, long-empty spaces at the same property all got filled within the same year, which means the walk from one end of Friendly Center to the other looks meaningfully different than it did in early 2025.
Same Few Months, Three Reopenings
Put those three timelines next to each other and the pattern is hard to miss. The golf course went dark in December 2024 and came back in fall 2025. The Food World building sat empty through most of 2025 and came back in January 2026. The Friendly Center spaces were announced as vacant-to-be-filled in April 2025 and were largely open by the end of that year. That's not three unrelated news items scattered across a couple of years. That's the same handful of months, at three different corners of the neighborhood's daily loop, all going from empty to open.
The practical effect is that a Starmount Forest resident's default routine tightened up without anyone announcing it as a single event. The gym trip, the golf outing, the dinner out. All three used to mean driving further than they do now, or driving past something closed. For a stretch of 2025, this was a neighborhood defined as much by what wasn't open as by what was. That's no longer true, and it happened fast enough that plenty of longtime residents probably haven't clocked all three changes yet.
If you're one of the people who drives West Market or cuts through Friendly Center without registering any of this, it might be worth a slower lap sometime this fall. The course looks different from Holden Road. The old grocery building has a line of cars out front before 6 a.m. And the post office space smells like fresh pasta now instead of nothing at all.
If any of this has you thinking more seriously about what's happening to home values or turnover in a neighborhood this connected to its country club, Pam Robbins Real Estate Group knows Starmount Forest block by block and is always glad to talk through it over coffee. You can also browse the Starmount Forest neighborhood page for a closer look at what's currently on the market there.
