On a Friday morning this past May, the butcher case at The Cut Butchery filled up with pink paper bags. Down the sidewalk, kids from Hooray Art were finishing a batch of hand-painted black aprons for the staff to wear all weekend. A local photographer set up nearby to catch it all on camera. None of these three businesses sell anything remotely similar. One cuts meat, one teaches four-year-olds to fingerpaint, one shoots portraits. For two days in Hollin Hall Shopping Center, they ran a joint fundraiser anyway, and it was the second year in a row they'd done it.
That detail is the whole story of this shopping center, if you know where to look.
A Fundraiser That Keeps Coming Back
Grillin' For The Girls started in 2025 as a two-day event between three Hollin Hall shop owners: Alex Kilroy of The Cut Butchery, Paige Bradford of Hooray Art, and photographer Renée C. Gage, raising money for breast health access through what was then the National Breast Center Foundation. It returned in May 2026, this time benefiting the Breast Cancer Collective, with Alex Kilroy of The Cut Butchery, Master Photographer Renée C. Gage, and Paige Bradford of Hooray Art once again hosting a two-day fundraiser, with the butchery team wearing one-of-a-kind aprons decorated by Hooray Art students throughout the weekend. The Cut donated 10% of all beef sales, targeting an increase of 10% to $5,500 this year.
That's not a one-time press release moment. It's a repeat commitment between businesses that have no obvious reason to coordinate other than sharing a sidewalk. The collaboration, which began as a shared effort among neighboring businesses, continues to grow each year. If you're picking a coffee shop or a hardware store based on which strip mall feels most like an actual place, that pattern matters more than square footage.
Why Neighbors Fundraise Instead of Just Coexisting
Most shopping centers are a collection of tenants who happen to share a parking lot. Leases get signed by a management company, storefronts turn over every few years, and the guy running the sandwich shop has never met the woman running the nail salon two doors down. Hollin Hall runs differently, and the reason shows up in how new businesses describe getting in the door.
When Urban Redeux, a vintage and antiques shop, was preparing to move into the center in 2021, owner Willow Wright talked about the process before signing anything.
"One thing that Hollin Hall has that my current space doesn't is other vendors and businesses. I'm between a bank and a restaurant, so I'm the only small business that's any sort of retail down where I am, but I'm looking forward to going up and being part of other retail spaces where there are people milling around and there is life to the shopping center."
She also described what it actually took to get a lease. Moving into the family run shopping center involves a sit-down with the owner before a business is allowed to lease space. Not an application through a leasing office. A conversation with the person who owns the building.
That's a structural detail, not a nostalgic one. When the person deciding who gets a storefront actually meets every incoming tenant, the mix stays intentional. Businesses land next to each other because someone thought they'd fit, not because a vacancy needed filling by the next applicant. A butcher, a children's art studio, and a photographer ending up close enough to run a joint fundraiser isn't luck. It's the outcome of a leasing process built around relationships rather than square footage rates.
A Shopping Center That Doesn't Turn Over Like the Others
The oldest tenant proves the pattern holds over decades, not just years. Ann and Ben Vennell opened the Hollin Hall Variety Store in 1958 in the south section of the strip mall and in 1964 moved to its current location. Almost seventy years later, it's still there, still stocking a little bit of everything from sewing supplies to school prizes, now run by a different family after the Vennells stepped back. In 2008, when rumors flew that the Vennells were retiring and selling, a "local firestorm" erupted, which tells you something about how attached this neighborhood gets to businesses that stick around.
Village Hardware sits a few doors down with the same kind of longevity, the sort of place where the guy behind the counter knows which aisle has the odd-sized screw before you finish describing the problem. Hollin Hall Pastry Shop anchors the coffee-and-conversation end of the center. None of these are new. None of them are chains.
The restaurant side of the center tells a similar story about how ownership changes hands here. For 40 years, Kathy Mack was part of a loving restaurant family who owned Via Veneto in Hollin Hall Village, and when the time came to pass the baton, she needed to find just the right buyer to continue the legacy her mother started. That buyer turned out to be next door the entire time. Sarai and Jose Navarrete had bought Roseina's, right next door to Via Veneto, in 2021, and soon became friendly with their new neighbors. After an outside offer for purchase fell through, Sarai was having a casual conversation with a staff member at Via Veneto, who wondered aloud whether she and Jose had ever considered buying it. A shopping center doesn't produce that kind of handoff by accident. It happens when the people running adjacent businesses actually know each other well enough to have that conversation in the first place.
New Doesn't Mean Outside the Circle
None of this means Hollin Hall is frozen in 1958. The newer businesses get pulled into the same fabric, they just take a little longer to show up in the record.
Hooray Art is barely a year and a half old. Hooray Art, a children's art studio, opened its doors on Jan. 20, 2025, in Hollin Hall Shopping Center, welcomed by owner Paige Bradford, a resident. What began as a backyard operation had already outgrown that space. What started as four kids in her backyard grew to 150 registered students for her upcoming classes by the time she moved in. A business that new was already co-hosting a neighborhood fundraiser within months of opening its doors, which says more about the center's social wiring than about Hooray Art specifically.
Nepenthe Gallery, an art gallery, frame shop, and photography studio, opened a few doors from Hollin Hall Pastry Shop and joined a wave of newer additions. Located right next to Hollin Hall Pastry Shop, it joined a number of new businesses that had opened in the past few years including Nature's Nibbles and Urban Redeux, alongside established stores and restaurants like Hollin Hall Variety Store, Village Hardware and Roseina's. The pattern holds across generations of tenants. Old and new end up in the same sentence, the same fundraiser, the same block.
What This Actually Means for Your Weekend
None of this requires an occasion. It's just where a Saturday morning goes if you live nearby: coffee at the Pastry Shop, a slow lap through the Variety Store's cluttered aisles for whatever you didn't know you needed, a stop at Village Hardware for the thing the previous stop reminded you about. If your kid has been asking about art classes, Hooray Art is close enough to walk to. If a name-your-occasion gift has stumped you, Nepenthe Gallery or Urban Redeux might solve it faster than a drive to a bigger shopping district would.
The next time a fundraiser banner goes up outside The Cut Butchery, it's worth stopping in. Not because it's a novelty, but because that kind of cross-business effort is the actual texture of Hollin Hall, the reason the center still feels like a place people belong to rather than a place people pass through.
If you're a longtime Hollin Hall neighbor with your own favorite corner of the center, or you're just curious what else is happening around Fort Hunt this season, Lauren Kolazas would love to hear about it. Let's Connect.
