Austin’s oldest H-E-B isn’t going anywhere after all.

After months of working with city of Austin traffic engineers, H-E-B has decided not to build a new store in the Twin Oaks shopping center, the company announced Tuesday.

Instead, H-E-B will demolish the existing store on the southwest corner of Oltorf Street and South Congress Avenue and build a multi-story building with underground parking on the current site, said Leslie Sweet, H-E-B's Central Texas director of public affairs. New planned features include a beer garden, a food hall and a stage for live music, which will replace the surface parking lot.

In 2016, the San Antonio-based grocery chain bought the Twin Oaks shopping center to explore opening a new supermarket across the intersection from where H-E-B has had a store since 1957.

Despite more renovations than any other area store over the years, the existing 70,000-square foot grocery store is at capacity. “We’re out of parking, and we’re out of space,” Sweet said.

Even though the Twin Oaks site is larger, it’s easier for a mass of southbound drivers heading home from downtown to make a right-hand turn into a store on the west side of the road. They’d looked at “a thousand iterations” of reconfiguring traffic patterns to move cars in and out of the Twin Oaks lot on the east side of South Congress, Sweet said, but they couldn’t overcome the concerns over traffic safety.

“We worked on it and we worked on it and we worked on it and then we licked our wounds and said, 'OK, we’ve got to rebuild on the current site,'” she said.

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Construction won’t start for at least a year, and Sweet said they expect the new store to take two years to build. In the meantime, H-E-B will open a temporary store in a 24,000 square-foot Twin Oaks storefront formerly occupied by CVS.

The temporary store will be much smaller than the current one, but twice as large as H-E-B’s smallest location, a 12,000 square-foot store on South Flores Street in downtown San Antonio.

Current employees at Oltorf/Congress can transition to the temporary store, and Sweet said they will need more than 450 partners at the new H-E-B under construction at Interstate 35 and Slaughter Lane, which is scheduled to open in early 2020 with a barbecue restaurant.

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During the planning and permitting process for the new South Austin store, Sweet said they’ll seek community input to find out what shoppers and neighbors want in the new store. “We know the design will change from here, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” she said. The store will update progress at heb.com/southcongress.

When they developed the Mueller H-E-B, which opened in 2013, Sweet attended nearly 30 community meetings, and the store added a restaurant and a community room because of customer feedback.

The working design for the new H-E-B includes more than 110,000 square-feet of grocery space, as well as the company's first beer garden, a stage for live music and a 12-vendor food hall.

The current store has about 550 parking spaces, but two stories of underground parking will expand that number to more than 850, including designated curbside pick-up and a drive-through pharmacy.

Architects have designed some second- and third-level office space in part of the main grocery area, which will extend into where the curbside parking area is now. Buffering homes on the west side of the property is a 25-foot grass installation that will include several trees they’ll need to relocate during construction.

“We want this to be a powerhouse food store with every fresh department and a holding capacity that we need and don’t have right now,” Sweet said. To keep up with one of the smaller but highest-trafficked stores in the city, staffers have to restock shelves four or five times a day — and even more often during South by Southwest and the Austin City Limits Music Festival.

“The store is overused. We can’t keep up,” she said.

The current renderings feature street-level entry through an outdoor seating area with a live music stage that backs up to Oltorf Street. Along the South Congress side of the corner, architects have designed an enclosed food hall with two-story windows, creating a shady respite from the heat that still feels like you’re eating outdoors, Sweet said.

Drivers will park on two floors below the building and enter the store from the parking garage, while street-level entry will be focused on welcoming pedestrians and bikers.

Part of the planning process involves picking vendors for the food hall. Although H-E-B has been developing its own restaurant concepts, including barbecue and tacos, this could be the first store to feature third-party food vendors, and those vendors could rotate seasonally, Sweet said. “We don’t have that anywhere else,” Sweet said. “It’s a whole new concept that is something we’ve been kicking the tires on for two years.”

The Oltorf/Congress store and I-35/Slaughter stores aren’t H-E-B’s only major construction and renovation projects in the works.

In February, H-E-B won the lease to run a store on property owned by the University of Texas on Lake Austin Boulevard. Sweet said that building, now a busy Randall's, will likely also have to be demolished and rebuilt with community input, but that the Congress/Oltorf store construction will start first.

The East Seventh Street store, the second-oldest location in the Austin area, is also being renovated this summer.

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The city’s population growth is helping fuel this grocery boom, and Sweet also said the addition of curbside and home delivery has allowed the store to keep pace with technology changes that are happening in the grocery industry at large.

When the Congress/Oltorf store opened, advertisements touted the market as “Austin’s largest and finest” with “extra spacious aisles and checkout areas,” a “barbecue rotisserie” and imported and domestic cheeses. The store had as many parking spaces when it first opened as it does now.

For many years, the store was open for 24 hours. Several years ago, the company cut back the hours because not enough people were shopping overnight, and now, only the Hancock location is open 24 hours a day.

As for the Twin Oaks shopping center — home to Family Dollar, TSO Optical, a dry cleaner, a loan office, Austin Shoe Repair, a Subway and a dance studio — H-E-B says it might one day sell the property, but for now, it will be focus on creating a temporary store that can handle the volume of the current location.

(Correction: An earlier version of this story said H-E-B bought the store on Lake Austin Boulevard; UT still owns the property.)