As 225 celebrates its 20th anniversary year, we’ll also be spotlighting other organizations and businesses celebrating milestones in 2025.
Like many native Baton Rougeans, developer Stephen Keller started his career in Texas and moved back home to raise his family. When he returned in 1999, he’d make frequent drives to the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport to fly into corporate offices in Houston. He’d often drive past the Witter family’s Live Oak Arabians horse farm on Jefferson Highway.
“It was 60 acres in the center of town that the roads all went around,” Keller remembers. “I was familiar with the developments in Houston. It took me a while to put stuff together. … I approached the family with a deal.”
That deal would become Towne Center at Cedar Lodge, a shopping center built on the grounds of the horse farm. Today, it hosts nearly seven dozen businesses, with several iconic national brands calling it home. It has helped set the standard for lifestyle and retail developments in the Capital Region over the last two decades.
Keller’s Creekstone Companies bought 48 acres along the eastern edge of Phil Witter’s Jefferson Highway property in 2003 and started construction. The name of the lifestyle development—Towne Center at Cedar Lodge—is a tip of the hat to Cedar Lodge Plantation, the former name of the grounds.
Specialty foods supermarket Whole Foods opened its doors to anchor the center in November of 2005, while other iconic national brands such as Nike, Ulta Beauty, White House Black Market and a variety of chain and local restaurants would ultimately round out the tenant mix.
Patrons can also shop from a collection of Louisiana retailers like The Queen Bee, The Tipsy Librarian and Rickey Heroman’s Florist & Gifts.
One notable aspect of the center, Keller says, is that there is no back to the property—there’s open-air shopping on both sides, with stores stretching outward along Jefferson Highway and Corporate Boulevard as well as toward the inner center of the development.
No longer Spanish moss-covered grounds for grazing horses, Towne Center has expanded over the years to feature banking and financial services offices, a business park and a hotel on the 30-acre property.
While ground broke more than 20 years ago on the project, the lifestyle development continues to grow.
This year, construction is set to begin on The Standard at Cedar Lodge, a 286-apartment community to be located behind the restaurants.
“We can have people who live in Towne Center,” Keller says, “and experience walking to the restaurants and retail—and have the full experience of the community.”
Towne Center, by the numbers
78
Number of businesses located in Towne Center
$110 million+
Tenant sales in 2023
9
Number of eateries shoppers can choose from, with Zea Rotisserie & Bar as the most recent opening
698,000
Estimated number of people who visit Towne Center each year, accounting for 3.5 million visits
Sources: Commercial real estate firm JLL, Stephen Keller
This article was originally published in the February 2025 issue of 225 Magazine.
