Ask someone at the bar at Angel's Icehouse when the new resort down the road is supposed to open, and you'll get the same answer you would have gotten in January: "September, right?" It's been the answer since Texas Monthly first previewed the project last November, since the Austin American-Statesman profiled its Michelin-starred chef in January, since CultureMap ran the same headline a couple of weeks later. Eight months of local coverage settled on one word, and residents driving past the cranes on Highway 71 have been circling that month ever since.
Canyon Ranch never actually promised September. It promised fall, and reporters rounded that to the start of the season. In June, the company put an actual date on the calendar, and it isn't the one most of Spicewood is still repeating.
The Announcement That Moved the Date
On June 16, 2026, Canyon Ranch issued a press release confirming that its 600-acre wellness resort on Lake Travis would begin welcoming guests on October 15, 2026, with reservations opening the same day. The release describes a property with 1.5 miles of Lake Travis waterfront, a 40,000-square-foot spa with 37 treatment rooms, and a 141-room resort surrounded by a 134-home residential community called the Ranch Home Collection.
That's a month later than the shorthand most people in town have settled on. It's a small gap, but it matters if you've been telling out-of-town guests to book a stay for their September visit, or if you've been waiting to see the property before deciding whether the Flying X Café is worth a Saturday drive.
What Actually Opens on October 15
Not everything on the property will be open to people who don't live there or aren't staying there. Estella, the resort's signature restaurant led by chef Val M. Cantú of the two-Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant Californios, is reserved for overnight guests and residents of the Ranch Home Collection. It won't be a public dining room competing with the rest of the Highway 71 corridor.
The property's more casual spot, Flying X Café, overlooking a pond on the grounds, is described by the resort as intended for a wider audience. Between Estella and the café, Canyon Ranch says it will run four food and beverage concepts in total once fully operational, though the resort hasn't detailed which of the remaining two will be open beyond guests and homeowners.
The homes themselves are still going up. Canyon Ranch's own site now lists the Ranch Home Collection starting at $3.8 million, a jump from the $3.5 million figure quoted when homesites first went on the market in the spring. Construction crews are still on site as of the resort's own June update, so the residential side of the property will keep changing shape well past opening day.
The Other New Address Down Highway 71
Canyon Ranch isn't the only relocation on that stretch of road this year. La Cabana Bar & Grill, the longtime Tex-Mex spot owned by Linda and Chip Holt, spent December 2025 in a demolition crew's path. Its original building came down to clear space for a new road tied to Lake Travis ISD's second high school. The restaurant reopened January 31, 2026 at the former site of Apis Restaurant, a few hundred yards from where it used to sit, with the same tamales, fajitas and margarita bar regulars have ordered for years.
The road that displaced it belongs to a project the district only recently agreed to name. In February, the Lake Travis ISD board approved "Highland Lakes High School" as the official name for what had been called High School #2, along with green, blue and white as the school colors. The district awarded an $11.88 million contract for Reimer's Road improvements back in March 2025, and by September of that year had signed off on a $46.36 million construction budget for the first phase. The school itself, delayed once already by slower-than-projected enrollment growth, is now targeting a 2028 opening rather than the 2027 date originally planned.
So the same corner of Spicewood is absorbing two multi-year projects at once: a resort with its own restaurant ecosystem, and a school with its own road network, both reshaping how that part of Highway 71 will feel to drive through by the time either one finishes.
What's Actually on the Calendar Before Then
A few dates worth knowing if you live here and want to plan around what's real, not what's rumored:
- September 25, 2026 — Spicewood Arts Society opens its 27th season with the Zeppelin Project, a touring tribute act, at its usual venue.
- Every Sunday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., year-round — the outdoor farmers market behind Pizzeria Sorellina keeps running rain or shine, same as it has for seasons now.
- October 15, 2026 — Canyon Ranch Austin opens reservations and begins welcoming its first guests, a month later than most of the coverage you've read has suggested.
None of these require a special trip to verify. They're the kind of dates that separate what a place is actually doing from what people assume it's doing because a headline from last winter never got corrected.
Why the Gap Is Worth Noticing
A month doesn't sound like much. But it's the difference between planning a visit around a date that doesn't exist yet and knowing when the Flying X Café actually starts serving. It's the difference between assuming La Cabana is still sitting in its old spot and knowing exactly which building it moved into. Spicewood is a place where a handful of long-running local sources, Community Impact, the Statesman, the district's own bond updates, tend to be more current than whatever aggregated preview ran eight months ago and never got a follow-up. The town changes in specific, dated ways. The rumor mill just doesn't always keep pace with the paperwork.
That's the same instinct that matters whenever the conversation eventually turns from what's opening down the road to what a property here is actually worth, what's attached to it, and what the fine print says before anyone signs anything. When that day comes, Eileen DePew brings more than two decades as a practicing attorney to the contract and title side of a Hill Country transaction, on top of the local knowledge that comes from actually tracking what's happening in Spicewood as it happens. Get peace of mind when you sign. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
