On February 16, hundreds of Bloomfield Township residents filled the auditorium at Township Hall on Telegraph Road for what had been billed as a routine neighborhood introduction to a new event venue. By the time the meeting wrapped up that night, planning commissioner Bruce Selik, who has served on the board for fifteen years, called it the most contentious meeting he'd ever sat through. Five commissioners voted unanimously to table the entire matter. More than six months later, no new vote has been publicly scheduled.
The project is Bloomfield Hollow, a proposed event venue on wooded land off Franklin Road, just north of Square Lake, backed by chef and restaurateur Zack Sklar of Peas and Carrots Hospitality. If a postcard about it landed in your mailbox sometime this year, or you've noticed the discussion at pickup lines and block parties near Franklin and Square Lake, you already know the outline of the fight: noise, traffic, alcohol service, tree removal, and whether a parcel zoned for research and light industrial use should host large private events. What's harder to pin down, even after more than six months of coverage, is a simple question underneath all of it. How big is this thing, actually?
Three Different Buildings, Same Address
Read the announcements that ran in January, in Crain's Detroit Business, the Detroit News, DBusiness, and Hour Detroit, and Bloomfield Hollow is a $17 million, 30,000-square-foot venue spread across two floors on a 30-acre forested parcel, complete with a sunken amphitheater and a glass-enclosed greenhouse. Read the Birmingham-Bloomfield Eagle's coverage of the same February 16 meeting, and the identical project becomes a 15,815-square-foot event center on a vacant 23-acre parcel. Downtown newsmagazine, reporting on that same meeting, puts the acreage at 18.
| Source | Reported square footage | Reported acreage |
|---|---|---|
| Crain's / DBusiness / Detroit News / Hour Detroit (January 2026) | 30,000 sq ft | 30 acres |
| Birmingham-Bloomfield Eagle (February 2026) | 15,815 sq ft | 23 acres |
| Downtown newsmagazine (February 2026) | 15,815 sq ft | 18 acres |
| ClickOnDetroit follow-up (June 2026) | 300,000 sq ft | not specified |
That last row is almost certainly a typo, since ClickOnDetroit's own February coverage of the same building cited 30,000 square feet. But nobody appears to have run a correction, which means the public record on this single project now spans a tenfold discrepancy in floor area depending on which article you happen to open first. The acreage figures move by more than 60 percent between the smallest and largest estimates. Nobody at the township has publicly reconciled any of it.
The same pattern shows up in how close the venue would actually sit to people's homes. Attorney Jonathan Martone, representing objecting residents, told local reporters that some homeowners live as close as 80 feet from the property line. Resident Brett Northcutt, describing the distance to where his kids play, used the figure "about 100 feet." The site plan filed with the township, according to Downtown newsmagazine's review of the planning documents, places the nearest house closer to 180 feet south of the proposed hall. Property line, building footprint, and nearest livable structure are three different measurements, so these numbers aren't necessarily contradictory in a legal sense. But nobody has stood up at a public meeting and connected them into one figure a resident could actually use to judge how close is close.
Guest capacity tells a similar story. Some coverage lists the venue at 600 seated guests. Other pieces cite 650 seated or "north of 1,000" for standing events. The developer's own quotes describe wanting to serve "600 to 700 people for a sit-down dinner," which is itself a range, not a number.
The Zoning Problem Nobody Put on the Postcards
Underneath the size confusion sits a more mundane but consequential fact. Bloomfield Hollow's parcel sits in the township's Research Park District, and under Bloomfield Township's own zoning code, banquet halls are only permitted in the B-4 district, a designation the township currently has no parcels zoned for at all. That's why the township had to open a separate zoning ordinance text amendment just to make Sklar's application legally viable in the first place, a step that got folded into the same February 16 hearing as the site plan review itself.
Planning Commission Chairman Jeffrey Salz used the meeting to say plainly that he would not support changing the ordinance to add banquet hall use, pushing back on residents who assumed the outcome had already been decided behind closed doors. Vice Chairman Richard Atto took the opposite position, noting his own experience with Research Park District properties and arguing the text amendment made sense. Commissioners John Kelly and Thomas Petinga weren't in attendance. The final vote, 5 to 0, tabled both the zoning amendment and the site plan and special land use review together, which means neither piece can move forward without the other returning to the agenda first.
June Restarted the Clock, and Raised a New Accusation
The township posted a fresh Notice of Public Hearing on June 15, scheduling the Planning Commission to reconsider the site plan and special land use proposal. The next day, ClickOnDetroit reported a new and more pointed dispute. Resident Brett Northcutt told the outlet that a property value analysis submitted through commercial real estate firm Signature Associates on behalf of Peas and Carrots Hospitality contained addresses and street names that don't exist. That analysis had claimed the five homes closest to comparable event venues elsewhere appreciated an average of 52 percent over the past ten years, a figure meant to reassure residents worried about their own property values. As of that report, no new vote date had been set, and nothing more recent has surfaced in our own research since.
Sklar's track record outside this parcel is well established locally. He's the co-owner, alongside pastry chef Justin Kurtz, of Cutting Edge Cuisine, a catering company now twenty years old that has handled events at Michigan Central Station and activations for brands including Gucci and Lamborghini. His restaurant group includes Social in Birmingham, Como's in Ferndale, and Beau's Grillery and Mex. That reputation is part of why the proposal drew serious attention from Oakland County business press in January. It's also part of why residents near Franklin and Square Lake feel the scale of the ambition outpaced the scale of the outreach.
What This Means If Franklin and Square Lake Is Your Everyday Drive
The Bloomfield Township planning process moves through the Planning Commission first, which sends a recommendation to the Township Board of Trustees for final approval or denial. That means even a favorable recommendation this fall wouldn't be the last word. The township posts every hearing notice directly on its own public notices page, which remains the most reliable way to see the actual filing dates rather than relying on secondhand summaries.
If this is the kind of civic story you like to keep half an eye on, it isn't the only one moving through township government this year. Our recent look at the phased closure of the Bloomfield Township Library covers a separate multi-year project working its way through the same kind of public process, on a very different timeline.
We'll keep watching the Bloomfield Hollow file as it moves, because the numbers on the page matter to anyone who lives near Franklin and Square Lake, whether or not a sale is anywhere on your mind. If you're weighing a move in or around Bloomfield Township and want someone who tracks these local details as closely as market conditions, Paul Wolfert and the Moving MI team are always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground here. Get a Free Home Valuation & Customized Marketing Plan whenever you're ready.
