Drive past 7001 Westown Parkway on a weekday evening and the building still reads like an office tower, all glass and structured parking, the kind of address you'd only notice if you worked there. For most of 2024 and into 2025, that read was accurate. Wells Fargo had moved out, the lot sat mostly empty, and the six-story building became one of those structures West Des Moines residents drove past without registering.
That's no longer what's happening inside. The building, now branded Atlas, spent the past year filling in with a day spa, a coffee counter, a wine bar built around a wood-fired oven, an event hall that seats 600, and a cocktail lounge you have to know to look for. None of it was announced with the fanfare of a grand opening banner out front. Most of it arrived in pieces, one lease at a time, which is exactly why so many people nearby still think of the building as the empty one.
The Building Everyone Assumed Was Still Empty
WB Realty bought the tower from Wells Fargo in late 2023 for $16.5 million, and Wells Fargo finished its move out the following year, leaving WB Realty with 415,636 square feet across six floors and no obvious next use. The company began redesigning the space in early 2024, and by that October it had opened the doors for a public look at the redesigned atrium and announced its first confirmed tenants: a day spa and salon on the west end of the first floor, and a restaurant and event operation on the rest of it.
The building itself wasn't new. It went up in 2000 and had already been through a renovation in 2020 and 2021 that added a new roof, solar panels, full generator backup, and an underground data center. What WB Realty was selling wasn't a fresh building. It was a well-built one that had lost its only tenant and needed a reason for other tenants, and eventually the public, to walk back in.
Why the Office Tenants Moved In Before the Restaurants Did
The order matters here, because it's the opposite of how most food-and-retail redevelopment stories usually go. Ordinarily a developer opens the restaurants first, hoping the foot traffic pulls in office tenants. At Atlas, the leasing came first.
By November 2025, roughly a third of the building's square footage was under lease, nine tenants deep. Then Athene signed for the entire fifth floor, about 70,000 square feet, to relocate around 420 employees from its lease at the Westfield Office Campus on Jordan Creek Parkway, which was set to expire the following March. Construction on Athene's space started November 1, 2025, and the move was finished by March 1, 2026. That's about 420 new daytime employees arriving inside the building in a five-month window, on top of whoever else had already signed leases through the fall.
The food and beverage tenants opened into that population, not ahead of it. Serenity Couture Salon & Spa, founded by Doug and Jana Van Polen in 2000, moved its flagship location into the building's main floor on October 27, 2025, consolidating locations to mark the salon's 25th year in business. The cafe, the wine market, and the event hall all opened after that, into a building that already had hundreds of people showing up for work every weekday.
What's Actually Open If You Stop By
Here's the rundown of what opened and when, since the timeline moved fast enough that it's easy to lose track:
| Business | Opened | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Serenity Couture Salon & Spa | October 27, 2025 | Flagship day spa and salon, main floor, west wing |
| Meridian Events & Catering | Grand opening January 29, 2026 | 16,000-square-foot venue, seats up to 600, up to 1,000 for a reception |
| Atlas Café | Mid-February 2026 | Lobby coffee counter with Doré Bakery pastries and sandwiches |
| The Atlas Room | Week of March 30, 2026 | Hidden cocktail lounge tucked inside Serenity Couture, Suite 120 |
| Purveyor West & Market | Spring 2026 | 110-seat restaurant built around an asado wood oven, plus a wine-and-grocery market |
One detail worth flagging before you plan an evening around it: as of an April 2026 visitor account, The Atlas Room still hadn't added a food menu, with the bar still working through that piece of the build-out. If a full dinner alongside cocktails matters to your plans, it's worth calling ahead rather than assuming the kitchen has caught up to the bar program since then.
The Lake With a Nickname
Behind the building, past the parking structure, there's a small pond ringed by a walking path and a scattering of picnic tables. It came with the property. What's new is that Michael LaValle, who runs the hospitality side of the redevelopment through LaValle Hospitality Group, has started calling it West Fest Lake and building programming around it. The site now includes a 30-foot lakeside stage with seasonal tented seating, designed for wedding ceremonies, trade shows, continuing education sessions, and concerts.
The ground-floor event space that opens onto that patio and lake takes its name, Meridian, from its position between the building's two wings.
"Things meet at the meridian."
That's how LaValle described the layout at the venue's January opening event, and it's a fair way to describe the whole project. It sits at the meeting point between a corporate campus that already had thousands of daily visitors and a hospitality group, LaValle also operates The Purveyor in the East Village, the River Center downtown, and Allora Café at the Krause Gateway Center, that had the restaurant and event experience to fill the space once the office tenants committed.
Why Here, Not Jordan Creek
It would be easy to assume any new restaurant cluster in West Des Moines is chasing the same audience as Jordan Creek Town Center a few miles away. Atlas isn't built for that crowd. The building sits along the University Avenue medical and office corridor, within reach of Methodist West and the Iowa Clinic's West Des Moines campus, an area with thousands of workers passing through on a given weekday, not shoppers looking for a destination mall.
That's shown up in early bookings. One medical group had already locked in 11 events at Meridian before the venue was fully open, and the cafe's daytime rhythm is built around the idea that tenants, nurses, and nearby medical staff will treat it like a regular lunch stop rather than a special occasion.
What This Means If You Live Nearby
If you've driven past this building for two years assuming nothing changed, here's what's actually true as of this fall:
- The coffee counter and lunch spot (Atlas Café) are open on weekdays and don't require any connection to the building's tenants to visit.
- The wine bar and market (Purveyor West & Market) has table seating for 110 and a grab-and-go section if you want dinner without staying to eat it there.
- The hidden bar (The Atlas Room) is accessible through Serenity Couture at Suite 120, worth a look for a cocktail, though check on food availability before building an evening around a full meal.
- The event space (Meridian, Suite 150) is bookable for private events and increasingly used for concerts and public gatherings on the lakeside stage, so keep an eye out for anything scheduled there this fall.
- The lake path behind the building is open and walkable regardless of what's happening inside, if you just want to see what a former Wells Fargo parking lot pond looks like with a name now.
None of this required the building to add square footage or move addresses. It required enough office tenants to move in that a restaurant group decided the daytime population alone was worth building around, and then the public got invited in on top of that.
If you're weighing whether your own home needs a similar kind of attention before it goes on the market, whether that's a room that needs a fresh look or a full plan for getting a place market ready, Tim Lucken REAL is a straightforward call away for a free Market-Ready Consultation.
