CreekHaus Is Orinda's Biggest Downtown Bet. The Backyard It's Named For Is Still Fenced Off.

"Imagine getting a glass of wine and seeing the creek view. And it's an urban creek restoration project. So that's perfect."

That's Michael Bowen, a member of Friends of Orinda Creeks, describing what he wants CreekHaus to become. He's not opposed to the project. Nobody on the creek side of this conversation is. What he can't get anyone to confirm, as of a Patch report from late June, is whether the public will actually be able to stand at that creek without buying a drink first.

If you live in Orinda, you already know the building he's talking about. It's the old Bank of America branch on Orinda Way, empty since March 2022, the one everyone driving past Community Park has watched sit dark for more than four years. What's replacing it, a project called CreekHaus, is the single largest private redevelopment in downtown Orinda in recent memory. It's also a useful test case for a question worth asking about any big promise attached to a small town: does the name describe what's being built, or what's being sold.

A Building That Outgrew Its Own Permit

Ben Zarrin, the Orinda-based developer behind CreekHaus, bought the vacant bank site in 2022 for $2.8 million, beating out other bidders including JPMorgan Chase, according to reporting in The Orinda News. Zarrin runs Paymun, a local design and development firm, and this is his first retail project after roughly fifteen years building high-end custom homes in the area, including his own house in the Wilder development.

The scope has grown twice since then. The original 2023 city approval called for renovating a 4,712-square-foot single-story building into an 8,810-square-foot, two-level structure with restaurant and office space. By 2025, revised plans pushed the footprint to 9,397 square feet and added a 540-square-foot third story for storage and rooftop mechanical equipment. Each revision touched the same detail: the rear deck facing San Pablo Creek, along with changes to windows, doors, facade materials, and the staircases needed to reach the upper decks.

For a town where commercial space is genuinely scarce, that's a real building. It just keeps getting bigger before anyone has settled what happens at the edge of it, where the property meets the water.

What's Actually Locked In

Some of CreekHaus is confirmed. Some of it is still a plan with a name attached.

Equator and PizzaHacker are real tenants with real addresses elsewhere. The bistro and cocktail lounge, as of an April 2026 write-up in Bay Area Telegraph, still had no disclosed ownership or management. That's the gap between what CreekHaus is and what CreekHaus is marketed as.

The Fence Line Behind the Marketing

CreekHaus describes itself, on its own site, as a project meant to feel "open, welcoming, and rooted in connection." The name does real work for that pitch. San Pablo Creek, a roughly 20-mile waterway that originates near Orinda, runs directly behind the property, and for most of downtown's history it's functioned as a hidden drainage corridor rather than a place anyone visits on purpose.

By June 2026, with construction moving toward completion, Patch reported that parts of the area behind the site were fenced off, with warning signs posted around the rear zone where the creek runs between the shopping center's parking lot and the highway. That's the same stretch of creek the project's name is built around.

City records complicate the picture further. Orinda's City Manager, Linda Smith, told Patch the city holds flood-management easements along the creek, but private property owners retain title to the adjacent land. Those easement rights can support specific public functions like flood control. They don't automatically resolve whether the public gets to walk up to the water on a Tuesday afternoon. Separately, Chevron offered to dedicate an adjacent creek segment to the city, and Orinda has up to ten years to decide whether to accept ownership. The city's downtown plan sketches a future creekside trail, but the policies that would actually create one haven't been adopted.

Asked directly about the tension, a Paymun accounting director told Patch only that the company would "continue to evaluate ways the project can positively contribute to the surrounding environment and broader community." That's a company keeping its options open, not a company making a commitment.

None of this means CreekHaus is a bad-faith project. Bowen himself points to creek restorations in Napa, Ashland, and San Luis Obispo as proof that private development and public creek access aren't mutually exclusive. It means the most-quoted line about CreekHaus, that it's Orinda's new backyard, is a promise the permit process hasn't caught up to yet.

The Square That Didn't Wait

While CreekHaus works through its third design revision, a few blocks away at Theatre Square, next to the Orinda Theatre, the smaller version of this same story already happened.

• Sorso Bar & Bites is taking over the long-vacant former Starbucks space at 2 Orinda Theatre Square. It's the work of Daniele Carsano, an Orinda resident of 13 years who previously built Montesacro in Walnut Creek and Casa Barotti in Berkeley. Sorso is an Italian tapas concept, small plates built around a wine list, with plans to stay open into the evening in a town that, as Carsano has said, doesn't currently have a room that lets you walk out of a movie and sit down for a glass of wine.
• Lamorinda Atelier, an art gallery mixing contemporary work with secondary-market pieces, opened at Theatre Square in November 2025.
• Kibi's, the longtime Vietnamese spot, is relocating across the square rather than closing.
• Morrison's Jewelers closed after more than 102 years in business, a reminder that this turnover cuts both ways.

Those changes sit alongside businesses that were already there: Fourth Bore, the tap room next to the Theatre, Serika under relatively new ownership, and Shemroon, a Persian-inspired coffee shop that opened next door to where Sorso is now finishing buildout.

None of this required a three-story addition or a creek-easement negotiation. It's smaller, it's already mostly done, and it didn't need a marketing name to explain what it is.

Two Timelines, One Season

Here's the detail that ties this together. In April 2026, CreekHaus's own messaging described the project as "opening this summer." By August 2026, a Diablo Dish update reported that the timeline had "evolved" into a phased rollout with no set opening date, starting with Equator and the beer garden and pushing the bistro and lounge to some point after that.

Compare that to Sorso, which had a matte-black storefront and a liquor license application taped to the window back in March, and which was already discussing spring or early-summer opening plans by April. Smaller bets, made by people who already live here and already know what the square needs, moved faster than the bet that came with a press release and a three-story addition.

That's not a coincidence specific to Orinda. It's what tends to happen when a project's ambition outpaces its permitting timeline: the parts that don't require resolving a public-access question open first, and the parts that do take longer, sometimes much longer, than the marketing implies.

What You Can Actually Do This Month

None of this has to wait on a construction schedule. The Orinda Farmers Market runs every Saturday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., year-round, on Orinda Way in front of Community Park, a short walk from both the CreekHaus site and Theatre Square. The Thursday night concert series at Community Park, hosted by Orinda Parks and Rec, continues on select dates through early October, with this year's lineup including the Kate Burkart Band, Salvage Title, Sixteen Scandals, and Tom and the Broken Hearts. And the Orinda Theatre's Live at the Orinda concert series, which sold out its 2025 to 2026 season, is expected to announce its next lineup this fall.

Downtown Orinda is genuinely different this year than it was two years ago. The proof just isn't the building everyone's watching. It's the square that filled back in while the flagship project was still arguing with itself over a fence line.

If you're curious how any of this downtown momentum, or lack of it, shows up in what your own Orinda property is worth, Russ Darby has been tracking the San Ramon Valley and Lamorinda market long enough to separate a real shift from a good press release. Request a home valuation whenever you're ready to see where your street actually stands.