Drive past 7750 SE 29th St on a Tuesday afternoon and you'll see a finished building where a construction fence used to be. For years, that corner of Town Center held MudBay, Tiger Garden Chinese Restaurant, and King Insurance. Now it holds Lunara, a four-story apartment building with 146 units, sitting on the block that spent nearly a decade in front of the Design Commission before anyone poured a foundation.
The residential side of the story is close to settled. Studio units started leasing this summer at rents beginning around $2,394, with some homes available for move-in as early as late June. If you've been watching the crane come down and assumed the whole question was answered, you're half right. The apartments have tenants. The ground floor doesn't, and that's the half of this project that was supposed to matter most to everyone who doesn't live in the building.
What the City Actually Promised Residents
Back in February 2021, when the Design Commission approved what was then called the Xing Hua project, the deal that got a four-story building through a skeptical Town Center wasn't really about the apartments. It was about the street. The approved plan called for roughly 14,030 square feet of ground-floor retail and restaurant space, built to hold three restaurants and six shops, plus a public through-block pedestrian connection along the north side of the property that formalized a cut-through Islanders were already using informally. A commissioner at the time called it a test of the Town Center code adopted back in 2016, the first big project to run through that framework and show whether it actually produced the kind of street life the code was written to encourage.
That's the part still open. The city's own construction update from this spring is direct about it: officials do not currently have information on what commercial tenants will occupy the ground-floor restaurant and retail spaces, and the building management company is still working on leasing them. Utility work and tenant improvements for those spaces weren't finished either, according to the same update. Nothing newer has surfaced since. So the building that was supposed to answer Town Center's retail question is, for now, the one storefront stretch in the neighborhood where the answer is least clear.
If you want to track it yourself rather than wait for a press release, the city's Xing Hua project page is where any tenant announcement will land first, since it's the same page that's carried every construction update since permits were issued.
Read the Leasing Flier Carefully
Commercial leasing materials for the building list a set of businesses the property sits near: Metropolitan Market, QFC, Starbucks, Mioposto Pizza, Orangetheory Fitness, Macrina Bakery. It's easy to skim that line and assume those are the tenants moving into Lunara's own ground floor. They're not. That's a list of existing neighbors used to describe the trade area, not a roster of who signed a lease inside the building itself. The actual ground-floor tenants, the ones who will determine whether this corner of 78th and 29th feels different in six months, haven't been named anywhere.
The Version Approved Wasn't Quite the Version Built
Worth sitting with for a second: the building that opened this summer isn't identical to the one the Design Commission signed off on in 2021. That approval was for 159 apartments, including 16 designated as affordable. What's leasing now is 146 units. Construction plans shift between approval and delivery for all kinds of reasons, and a drop from 159 to 146 isn't unusual on its own. But the affordable unit commitment from that original approval doesn't appear anywhere in Lunara's current leasing material, at least not in anything published so far. That's not an accusation, it's an open question, and one worth asking if you're the kind of resident who sat through those 2021 hearings and remembers what was promised in exchange for a bigger building than Town Center had seen before.
The project also carried a construction cost of $52.8 million, according to the design team overseeing it, on a site whose ownership group had been working through this specific proposal since 2018. That's a long runway for a building whose most visible feature to a passerby, the storefront glass along 78th and 77th Avenues, is still sitting empty.
A Smaller Storefront Down the Block Already Has an Answer
Here's the part that makes the empty ground floor more interesting rather than less. A few blocks away, at 2707 78th Ave SE, a much older and smaller commercial space already has a tenant lined up. Danji Korean Cuisine, which runs a flagship location in Issaquah, has a liquor license approved for a second Mercer Island location at that address. No opening date has been announced yet either, so this isn't a story about one project moving faster than the other. But that particular storefront has a long lineage in Town Center, having previously housed Alpenland Delicatessen and Pogacha, and now it has a named business with real filings behind it working toward opening. Lunara's ground floor, despite being the newest and largest commercial space in Town Center, has none.
That contrast is the whole point. The building everyone watched go up floor by floor for two years is currently the least resolved retail story on the island. The corner nobody was paying attention to already knows what's coming.
Why This Is Worth Watching If You Already Live Here
The 2021 commission hearing framed this project as a test of whether the newer Town Center code could deliver a building that served the neighborhood better than the alternative. Comparisons at the time referenced an earlier five-story proposal from a different developer back in 2015, one that drew enough pushback from a group called Save Our Suburbs that the City Council considered a moratorium on Town Center building permits. The version that eventually got built came in at four stories instead of five and left out an adjacent parcel that group had objected to including.
That fight was about scale and process. It's mostly settled now. What isn't settled is the thing the scale argument was supposedly in service of: whether this stretch of Town Center gets the kind of retail activity that makes a two-minute walk from Metropolitan Market to your dinner table feel like it did before construction started, or whether the storefronts sit dark for another season while lease negotiations play out. Residents who remember the hearings know the building was sold on what would happen at street level, not on the studio floor plans. That part of the story is still being written, and it's happening this month, not back in 2021.
If you're the kind of Mercer Island resident who's walked past that fence for two years wondering what would eventually go in, the honest answer right now is nobody knows yet, including the city. Keep an eye on the project page. The next real update won't be about the building. It'll be about who signs the lease.
If you're curious how a project like this tends to ripple through nearby home values once the retail question actually gets answered, or you just want a longtime local's read on what's changing in Town Center, the Andrew Jackson Team has been watching this corner of Mercer Island for a long time. Let's Connect.
