"One of the biggest things was just seeing what the place could be. We just needed direction, consistency and a clear identity."
That's Cole Dunbar, the chef who took over the old Austin's space at 120 Country Club Drive last fall and turned it into Paxton's Settlement. He's talking about a restaurant. But the split he's describing runs through Incline Village's whole 2026 season, and it goes in a direction most residents haven't quite clocked.
The project everyone watched all summer, the tear-down and rebuild at Incline Beach, was designed from the start to disrupt as little as possible. IVGID moved the beach's signature concert series next door, kept the same bands and the same emcee, and treated continuity as the whole point. Meanwhile a restaurant swap that barely made the local news, quiet enough that most people only noticed when they walked in for dinner, changed more about what Incline actually feels like than a $9 million construction project ever will.
The Beach House Project Went to Real Lengths to Not Change Anything
The Incline Beach House Project has been in planning since 2016, which tells you something about how long the Lake Tahoe basin's permitting process runs before a shovel touches dirt. IVGID's board approved a construction contract worth $9,415,617 with CORE Construction in December 2025, a figure the district said came in about a million dollars under earlier discussions. Add in nearly a decade of design and permitting work, and the Tahoe Daily Tribune reported the full project at closer to $11 million once it broke ground in mid-April 2026.
What actually got torn down: the beach's restroom and food service building, unchanged since the 1970s, is being replaced with a structure that will include a bar and patio. What got disrupted in the meantime: the main entrance to Incline Beach closed, a temporary entrance opened with limited parking, and the beach's long-running Music on the Beach concert series had nowhere to go.
IVGID's solution says a lot about how the district thinks about its own traditions. Rather than cancel the season, the district moved the concerts next door to Ski Beach and took over management of the series itself. But it kept Mitch Harbaugh, who has run Music on the Beach for more than a decade, under contract to book the bands and emcee the shows. Same lineup philosophy, same voice on the microphone, different sand. The series closed out its first full season at Ski Beach in late August, and by every account residents got the show they expected. The location changed. Nothing else did.
The Restaurant That Didn't Move an Inch Changed Completely
Now walk a few minutes inland to Country Club Drive, across the street from the Hyatt Regency. The building at 120 Country Club Drive #24 didn't close. It didn't relocate. It didn't get a construction fence. It just quietly stopped being Austin's.
Around October 2025, Cole Dunbar and Jordan Armstrong took over the space, Dunbar as executive chef and Armstrong as beverage director, and rebuilt it from the studs out as Paxton's Settlement. New staff, a full rebrand, a new menu built around fresh, seasonal ingredients. Same address. Same parking lot. Same view across the street to the Hyatt. Almost nothing else the same.
Within months, word had reached beyond the Tahoe basin, with visitors from Los Angeles and San Francisco already showing up specifically for the new identity, according to the Sierra Sun's reporting. That's a fast turnaround for a restaurant that, geographically, never moved.
The two stories sit right next to each other in the timeline and run in opposite directions. The project built around permanence, physical infrastructure, a decade of planning, a board-approved budget, changed its location and preserved everything else about the experience. The business built around flexibility just changed everything about itself while staying exactly where it was.
What Actually Moved vs. What Actually Changed
| Location | Identity | |
|---|---|---|
| Music on the Beach | Moved to Ski Beach for the season | Same bands, same emcee (Mitch Harbaugh), same IVGID tradition |
| 120 Country Club Drive | Never moved | Austin's became Paxton's Settlement under new ownership |
That contrast matters if you live here because it tells you where to actually expect disruption next. The beach construction, however inconvenient the parking has been this summer, is a known quantity with a defined end point. The dining scene doesn't work that way. Sage Leaf, Crosby's Kitchen & Cocktail over in Christmas Tree Village, and Incline Bak'd are all still doing what they've always done, but the corridor around them keeps turning over on its own schedule, on no calendar anyone posts in advance.
What's Actually Different Heading Into Fall
For residents planning the next few months, a few things are worth tracking on their own separate clocks:
- The Grille at The Chateau, the restaurant inside the Championship Golf Course clubhouse, runs its 2026 season through mid-October. It added Sunday brunch specials for the first time this year, 11am to 2pm, on top of its regular lunch, happy hour, and weekend dinner service.
- Music on the Beach already closed out its 2026 run at Ski Beach in late August. Whatever happens with the beach house construction timeline, the concert series itself won't be back until next year's season.
- Paxton's Settlement is coming up on its first anniversary at 120 Country Club Drive this fall, the point where early buzz either settles into a steady local following or doesn't.
- Incline Beach House construction continues into the fall and winter, with the beach's main entrance still limited and parking still constrained. There's no published reopening date yet, which is normal for a project with this much permitting history behind it.
None of these are the kind of thing that shows up on a real estate listing. They're the kind of thing you notice because you already live here and the rhythm of the place just shifted slightly under your feet.
Two Clocks, Same Town
The lesson isn't that public projects move slow and private ones move fast, though that's often true. It's that the places built to withstand disruption, run by a public agency with a budget line and a board vote, can preserve an experience through real physical upheaval. And the places that look stable from the outside, same building, same parking lot, same street number, are often the ones quietly becoming something else entirely. If you want to know what Incline Village will feel like in a year, the beach construction fence will tell you less than the turnover happening one street back from the water.
If you're weighing a move to Incline Village, or thinking about what a property near this corridor is actually worth once you look past the season's headlines, The Moore Team knows this neighborhood at the level these two stories require. Schedule a free consultation and we'll walk you through what's changing here, and what isn't.
