Drive down M-75 into Walloon Lake Village this month and you will not find a single dark storefront. That sounds like a small thing until you know the village's recent history, because for most of the last several decades, an empty building on Main Street here was the rule, not the exception. This summer, for what appears to be the first time in living memory, every commercial space in the village is occupied.
The person who can tell you exactly when that happened is Matt Thatcher, who opened Walloon Watershed with his wife Meghan in the fall of 2024. He did not set out to make a historical claim. He was just explaining, to a reporter from Northern Express, why he and Meghan decided to open a bar and small-plates restaurant in a village that already had two well-loved dining rooms.
A Village That Spent Decades Half Empty
Walloon Lake's village was a genuine resort boomtown a little over a century ago, when families from Chicago and St. Louis rode the train up to escape the summer heat, and a dozen hotels and amenities filled in around the shoreline. The Hemingway family was among them, and Ernest Hemingway's boyhood summers on the lake later found their way into his Nick Adams stories.
That boom did not last. In the years before developer Jonathan Borisch, a village native, began rebuilding it, the village had shrunk to almost nothing: a gas pump at the end of a dock, a bare-bones building behind it, and a general store on the main road. The revival started in 2013, when Borisch opened Barrel Back Restaurant. The following year, his family acquired the 1891 Walloon Lake Inn, once known as Fern Cottage, one of the village's original hotel-restaurants. In the spring of 2015 came Hotel Walloon, a 32-room boutique property that earned a AAA Four Diamond rating the following year and was named Travel + Leisure's No. 1 resort in Michigan in 2022.
For a decade, the rebuild happened one building at a time, and there was almost always a next space waiting to be filled. That is what changed this year.
The Last Vacant Space
The final piece was the building Thatcher and his wife moved into. In his words to Northern Express, it was "basically the last space in the village." He put it more bluntly a moment later:
"There are basically no more vacancies anywhere in the village. So, Meghan and I decided that this was the last opportunity for us to do something like this. And if we didn't, someone else would."
Meghan's family has summered on Walloon Lake for 42 years, and the couple's first business together was not a restaurant at all. They started Walloon Lake Boat Company, a private charter tour operation, in 2023. Walloon Watershed grew out of conversations Matt had with boat clients who told him they were looking for something to do in the village beyond what already existed. He wanted a space that split the difference between Barrel Back's casual energy and the Walloon Lake Inn's more formal dining room, with a wine cellar room behind wrought-iron sliding doors and a cocktail list built around Northern Michigan distillers like Foggy Mountain in Boyne Falls, Mammoth Distillery in Central Lake, and Gypsy Distillery and High Five Spirits in Petoskey.
What The Renwick Finished
The other piece that closed the gap was a building called The Renwick, which broke ground in January 2023 on the site of the old Walloon Village General Store, a market that had operated there since the 1970s. The project combined 16 condominiums upstairs with a rebuilt general store and retail space on the ground floor, and it was one of the last remaining vacant footprints in the village core.
Walloon Lake covers roughly 4,280 acres and for years carried a stock of only about ten condominiums total, so a single 16-unit building represented a meaningful shift in what kind of housing existed in the village itself, apart from the surrounding lakefront homes. The ground floor brought back the general store under new ownership, and the retail space around it filled in with businesses that did not exist in the village five years ago: Iron Goat Coffee, Vilah Bloom, Sweetwater Floral, and Vintage Mercantile Antiques. Between The Renwick's retail bays and Walloon Watershed's last available storefront, the build-out that started with Barrel Back in 2013 finally closed.
The Late-Summer Rhythm You Can Set a Clock By
None of this happened in isolation from the village's calendar, which runs on a rhythm that longtime residents already know by feel. Walloon Lake Winery hosts Tunes at Walloon every Thursday evening through August 27, with live music in the pavilion from 6 to 8 p.m. and a bring-your-own-chair, no-outside-alcohol policy that keeps it low-key. Legacy Watersports & Marina runs its own seasonal arc, from the Rock the Dock kickoff early in summer through a Labor Day weekend send-off with live music and boat demonstrations along the docks. Village Green Park hosted this year's Walloon Woodies show on August 1, where vintage mahogany boats lined the shoreline for an afternoon, a tradition that has become one of the more photographed weekends on the lake.
Sitting alongside the retail calendar is a separate one run by the Walloon Lake Association and Conservancy, the nonprofit that monitors the watershed itself. Its 2026 summer schedule includes guided hikes through the Wander Walloon education series, volunteer stewardship days, and a new Summer Speaker Series bringing in experts on conservation topics specific to the lake. WLAC's executive director, Jon Breithaupt, described the season this way: summer is when the community comes alive around the lake. The organization's biggest fundraiser, Love Walloon, drew supporters to Lavender Hill Farm on August 6 this year for a gala benefiting the conservancy's work protecting the lake the village's entire business district depends on.
Testing Whether the Season Can Stretch Past Labor Day
What makes this particular summer worth paying attention to is not just that the village filled in. It is that the community is now testing whether a fully occupied village can hold onto business past the traditional end of the season. For the first time, Walloon Lake Village is hosting an Autumn Festival on October 3 and 4, spread across the heart of downtown. The two-day event includes a Taste of Autumn cook-off benefiting the Mana Food Project, live wood and pumpkin carving demonstrations, an autumn market set up in The Talcott, and live music from bands that played the summer circuit, including Jelly Roll's Blues Band and The Blitz.
A village that spent decades with empty storefronts never had the density of businesses to make a shoulder-season festival worth trying. This year it does, and the fact that organizers are testing it for the first time tells you something the retail count alone does not: the people running these businesses believe the village can support activity beyond the Fourth of July to Labor Day window that has defined it for years.
What This Actually Means if You Live Here
None of this changes what Walloon Lake is at its core, a 4,280-acre lake that families have been quietly returning to for four generations. What it changes is what a walk through the village looks like on a Tuesday evening in August, or a Saturday in early October. There is no more guessing which storefront will sit empty through another season. The general store your kids have been buying popsicles at for years is back under new ownership in a new building. The last empty space in town now pours a cocktail built around a distillery an hour away. And for one weekend in October, the village is going to find out whether all of that adds up to a place people want to visit after the boats come out of the water.
If you're curious what a fully built-out village does to property values on the lake around it, or if you're weighing your own place in this community, Coldwell Banker Fairbairn Realty has been watching Walloon Lake's build-out unfold for years and can walk you through what it means for your own corner of the shoreline. Reach out any time for a free home valuation.
