The Building on Maple Avenue Armonk Can't Stop Watching
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
If you walk Main Street on a Saturday morning, you've probably had some version of the conversation. Someone mentions Wren of the Woods, the restaurant that's supposedly coming to 12 Maple Avenue. Someone else says they thought it was already open by now. A third person says they heard it got held up over parking, which is true, but only tells about a third of the story.
What's actually been happening at that address for three years is less a restaurant opening and more a running argument about what downtown Armonk can absorb, who pays for growth, and how much a town is willing to trade for a business it says it wants. The food is almost beside the point.
The concept itself is straightforward enough. Wren of the Woods is a farm-to-table restaurant and bar built around chef Roxanne Spruance, who sources produce from a 117-acre regenerative farm the ownership group operates in Livingston Manor, in the Catskills. The plan calls for lunch and dinner service in a space designed with what the team describes as a biophilic feel, and a later-night bar meant to pull in a younger crowd than the town's dinner-and-home-by-nine reputation usually attracts. It's a real concept with real backing, and it's the reason 643 people signed a petition supporting the project back when it was still working through approvals.
None of that explains the three-year timeline. The approvals did.
The building sat empty for years before anyone proposed a restaurant for it, which made the idea popular before a single hearing happened. The trouble started with parking. Owner Stefan Martinovic wanted to expand the original 1,700-square-foot structure to 3,600 square feet, with 90 seats indoors and another 54 outdoors on a seasonal basis. North Castle's zoning code ties parking requirements to seat count and square footage, and a restaurant that size needed more spaces than the lot could physically hold.
The town's Zoning Board of Appeals granted a 33-space variance in February 2024, with Martinovic lining up offsite agreements with two other property owners to cover the gap within walking distance of the restaurant. That didn't settle it. The Planning Board spent months hearing from residents on both sides. Some argued parking downtown was rarely a real problem. One resident put it plainly at a hearing, saying he'd never had to walk more than a couple hundred feet for a spot in four years of living nearby. Others argued the opposite, that adding 144 seats to a block that already strains on concert nights and Frosty Day was asking for exactly the kind of headache the town was trying to build its way out of.
The board sided with the restaurant. By a 4-1 vote in April 2024, the Planning Board granted conditional approval for the 144-seat project at 12 Maple Avenue.
A rough timeline of how it got there:
Approval came with strings attached, and the strings turned into their own fight. As part of the conditions of approval, Martinovic initially offered the town $51,000 through a Community Benefits Agreement, the kind of negotiated package towns sometimes ask developers to fund in exchange for site plan sign-off. The town came back asking for $176,000, a gap large enough that Martinovic called the counteroffer unreasonable and said it could eat into a meaningful share of the restaurant's first-year profits.
The timing made it messier. Martinovic said he found it curious that the town's counterproposal arrived around the same time longtime Armonk developer Michael Fareri sent an email to town officials warning that the parking plan created a safety hazard. In their own public response, the Wren of the Woods team noted that Fareri had a multifamily project of his own under construction on Bedford Road at the time. Whether that overlap shaped the town's number is something only the people in that room can say for certain. What's on the record is that a six-figure gap opened up over a restaurant's community benefits package, and it slowed things down further.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only follow the restaurant news: North Castle was already in the middle of its own parking expansion when this fight broke out. The town had been renovating and expanding the lot around the North Castle Public Library, land it purchased in part from Verizon, with a first phase adding roughly 60 new spaces near downtown. Town officials described the long-term goal as doubling the number of parking spaces in Armonk proper, with future phases planned for the west side of Main Street and the Kent Place lot.
That context matters. A single restaurant asking for a 33-space variance isn't a crisis on its own. It becomes a flashpoint when it lands in the middle of a town already negotiating, block by block, how much more traffic its own Main Street can hold while the infrastructure to support it is still under construction. Wren of the Woods didn't create Armonk's parking conversation. It walked into one that was already happening and became the test case everyone used to argue about it.
Whatever happens with the opening date, Wren isn't filling an empty dining scene. Armonk's Main Street already supports Restaurant North, a four-time James Beard nominee now working with a new executive chef who came from The Modern and The Pines in New York City. A few doors down, Moderne Barn has run for over a decade as the Livanos family's New American flagship, alongside longtime staples like Gavi, Zero Otto Nove, Casa Tequila, and The Beehive, plus daytime regulars like Armonk Country Kitchen and the newer Bluestone Lane café. Adding 144 seats to that mix, on a block that already fills up fast during summer concert nights, is a meaningfully large bet, not a gap-filler.
There's one piece of this story that has nothing to do with when the doors open. As part of the approvals process, the Wren of the Woods team helped launch a Facebook group called Sustainable Streets Armonk, which grew to around 65 actively engaged members and has talked about becoming a local chapter of Strong Towns, a national nonprofit focused on walkable, financially resilient town design. Groups like that tend to stick around long after the projects that started them get built, delayed, or shelved entirely. If Armonk ends up with a more organized, more permanent voice in how its downtown grows, that may turn out to be the more lasting effect of this whole saga, regardless of what year the first table gets seated at 12 Maple Avenue.
As of the most recent public update, from spring 2025, the target opening was still "late 2026," with construction expected to begin that fall. There's been no newer confirmation since. If you've been checking the windows on Maple Avenue expecting news, you're not missing anything. Nobody else has it yet either.
For more on what's shaping downtown Armonk right now, the neighborhood page has a closer look at the area beyond this one address.
Whenever the doors do open, or if you're just curious about what else is changing on this stretch of Main Street, The Danielle Reese Team keeps a close eye on the small stuff that shapes a place like Armonk. Let's start a conversation.
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