If you've driven down Green Valley Road anytime in the last four years, you've passed a building that used to be purple and now isn't, sitting closed the entire time. For most of Franciscan Village, this stretch of road isn't a destination. It's the route: to Highway 50, to the grocery store, to school pickup. The building at 363 Green Valley Road has just been part of the scenery, dark and empty since The Purple Place closed in August 2022.
This summer, the color changed. So did the sign.
That's a small detail to build a whole story around, except it's the first real evidence, after four years of neighborhood speculation, that something has actually been decided about what goes into that space next.
The wait wasn't the neighborhood's fault, it was the landlord's choice
The Purple Place opened in 1955 and spent decades as what locals just called El Dorado Hills' original roadhouse, a family-friendly sports bar known for live music and all-day breakfast. Mike and Denise Hountalas bought it in 2006 and ran it for sixteen years before their lease negotiations with property owner Amy Anders broke down in 2022. Rent increases, improvement costs, and communication problems all got blamed, depending on who you asked. The restaurant closed that August, and the building has sat vacant since.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if all you clocked was an empty storefront and assumed nobody wanted it: Anders wasn't struggling to find a tenant. She was turning tenants away. "I had a lot of interest from entrepreneurs with various backgrounds," she told a local paper. She held out anyway, insisting she'd never considered putting anything other than a restaurant in that space.
That's an unusual amount of patience for a landlord sitting on a vacant building along a road that every Franciscan Village resident drives multiple times a week. It also reframes the four-year gap. The building wasn't empty because the corridor was struggling. It was empty because the property owner was filtering for a specific kind of operator instead of just signing whoever showed up first with a check.
Who she picked, and why it isn't outside money
The operators she settled on are Eric Rushing and Thomas Holzmann, both El Dorado Hills residents. Rushing has spent close to three decades building bars and live-music venues across the region, including Goldfield Trading Post, Ace of Spades, Holy Diver, and The Cabin. He's also behind Yager Lodge, a project taking shape inside Historic Folsom's original Yager's brewery building. He's lived in El Dorado Hills for fifteen years, and of the roughly twenty venues he's opened across Sacramento, this is the first one in his own neighborhood. He's called it one of the single most important projects of his life.
Holzmann is newer to the restaurant business but brings his own local roots to the partnership. As he put it, the two of them are "very excited to bring something new to the community."
That framing matters more than it might seem. A vacant building on a residential corridor could have gone to a regional chain looking for cheap square footage, or to an investor group with no ties to the area. Instead it went to two guys who already live in El Dorado Hills and were, by their own account, mourning the loss of the old spot along with everyone else.
What's confirmed so far
Here's what's been reported as of this summer, pulled together in one place for anyone tired of piecing it together from a half-dozen local news sites:
- Name: Lake House
- Address: 363 Green Valley Road, the same building that housed The Purple Place
- Menu direction: new American comfort food with a strong focus on brunch and breakfast, still being shaped with local chefs
- Seating: indoor confirmed, outdoor seating possible
- Exterior: repainted from all-purple to a dark blue and white color scheme, with Lake House signage installed
- Timeline: no firm opening date as of this reporting, but Holzmann has said the target is before the end of 2026
Nobody involved has promised an exact date, and after four years of watching that building sit still, most residents will believe it when they see cars in the lot.
The color change is the actual signal
It would have been easy for Rushing and Holzmann to repaint the building purple and lean hard on nostalgia. They didn't. The new dark blue and white palette is a visible break from what came before, and that's worth reading as a decision, not an accident. This isn't a restoration project trying to recreate The Purple Place under new ownership. It's a new identity going into the same footprint, built by people who remember what the old one meant to the block but aren't pretending they can just reopen it with a fresh coat of the same paint.
At the same time, the menu direction, comfort food, brunch, breakfast, a family-friendly atmosphere, tracks closely with what made the original spot a fixture for sixty-seven years. So the through-line isn't the name or the color. It's the function: a casual, everyday gathering spot on a road that residents already use constantly, whether they're headed to Costco or just walking the dog around the corner.
What this actually changes for the daily routine
Franciscan Village sits between El Dorado Hills Drive, Francisco Drive, and Green Valley Road, which means this particular building isn't some distant Town Center project. It's on the edge of the neighborhood, on a road most residents already drive several times a week without thinking about it. For four years, that stretch has had a gap in it: a building everyone recognized and nobody could use.
Whenever Lake House actually opens, and Holzmann's own target puts that sometime before the end of this year, it closes that gap. Not with a chain that could open anywhere, and not with an anonymous investor group cashing in on a vacant lot, but with two neighbors who picked this specific building because it's in their own community and Amy Anders picked them for the same reason.
That's the part worth knowing before the grand opening headlines show up: the four-year wait wasn't the neighborhood losing relevance. It was the opposite. It was a landlord holding out for operators who actually live here, and getting them.
If you're weighing a move in or around Franciscan Village and want a read on what a neighborhood is actually like day to day, not just what a listing photo shows, Darya Ghomeshi works these El Dorado Hills communities directly and can walk you through it. Request a complimentary market consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
