"I was hoping to use the hotel to welcome guests for the 100th homecoming event," Ball State President Geoffrey Mearns said this spring, "but with the delay, I'm a little disappointed." He was talking about The Cantio, the 97-room hotel rising inside Ball State's Village redevelopment, and the admission matters more than it sounds. Nearly everyone who has read about this project over the summer thinks the hotel's three new restaurants, including a Bob Ross-themed dining room, are on track for a fall opening. Mearns' own comments say otherwise.
If you live anywhere near campus, you've probably already seen the coverage. A wire story out of the Indianapolis Star, picked up nationally in early July, described a Bob Ross-inspired restaurant called Believe You Me's opening at The Cantio "in fall 2026," full stop. That's the version circulating on social feeds and group chats right now. It's also the version that stopped being accurate months before it ran.
What the Press Release Promised
The Cantio is part of Hilton's Tapestry Collection, built to connect directly to Ball State's new Performing Arts Center in the district the university calls The Village. Three restaurants are going in as part of the hotel. Believe You Me's, on the ground floor, is built around Bob Ross and serves what Schahet Hotels has described as elevated American classics, with hours planned for 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday. Upstairs, the fifth floor holds The Broken Record, a rooftop restaurant and lounge with skyline views. Schahet Hotels CEO Jeffrey Brown has said the name nods to a story about David Letterman's college radio show at Ball State, where he supposedly broke records on air when a caller didn't like a song. Brown has also said the university couldn't confirm the story ever happened, and he likes the name anyway. Rounding out the trio is Beeman's Corner, a café honoring Mary Beeman, who taught home economics at Ball State from 1929 to 1951, with some of her own recipes reportedly showing up on the dessert menu.
Hiring for restaurant staff was slated to begin by the middle of 2026, which tells you the project was, at that point, still tracking toward the original timeline. That's the story most people outside Muncie know.
The Timeline That Slipped
Here's what closer reporting caught that the wire story didn't. In an April 2026 interview with Ball State's own student newspaper, Mearns confirmed the hotel had fallen behind the other Village buildings going up around it. His words were direct: the hotel probably won't open for guests until November or December. That pushes the opening past the university's 100th Homecoming in October, an event Mearns had specifically hoped to use the building for.
The gap between what ran in July and what Ball State's president said in April is the whole story here. The July piece wasn't wrong about the plan. It just reprinted the original announcement without checking whether the plan had moved, and by the time it published, campus reporting had already flagged the slip for months. A month after Mearns' comments, Schahet Hotels CEO Jeffrey Brown told the Indianapolis Business Journal he was looking forward to getting the hotel open "toward the end of this year," which lines up with a November or December opening rather than anything tied to fall semester. Two sources close to the project, on the record, a month apart, say the same thing the wire story missed. If you're planning a Homecoming weekend dinner around a Bob Ross theme, plan somewhere else.
What's Actually On Schedule
The hotel and its restaurants are the piece that slipped. Most of the rest of The Village is not waiting on them.
- The Performing Arts Center was slated to be up and running by the time classes resumed this August and will host roughly 160 events a year once it's fully in use, everything from student productions to touring acts.
- The Center for Innovation and Collaboration, a $21.3 million, 31,000-square-foot building for labs, studios, and community partnerships, was on track to have tenants moved in by the end of summer, with a grand opening still planned this fall.
- Village Green, a public gathering space at Martin Street and University Avenue, went through a design competition among Ball State architecture students that drew 54 submissions and nearly 2,000 public votes. Its completion is estimated for fall 2027, so this one is further out.
- Village South Residential Development is adding 17 attached townhomes and 8 single-family homes just southeast of the district. A first phase of nine homes is scheduled to finish this fall, with a second phase expected to have started by the end of summer.
So the district as a whole is not behind schedule. The hotel is. That distinction gets lost when a single wire story treats the whole project as one opening date.
A Theme That's Older Than the Hotel
It's worth saying plainly that Believe You Me's isn't grafting a random celebrity name onto a hotel restaurant for novelty. Bob Ross recorded The Joy of Painting at WIPB, Ball State's own public television station, for roughly a decade starting in 1983. The building where he filmed still stands on Minnetrista's campus, and since 2020 it has operated as the Bob Ross Experience, drawing visitors who want to stand in the same room where he painted on camera. That's a short walk from where the new restaurant is going in. The connection between Ross and this specific stretch of Muncie isn't marketing shorthand. It's a piece of the town's own broadcasting history, and the restaurant is building on ground that was already part of the story.
What This Means If You Live Near Campus This Fall
If your plan was to grab a table at Believe You Me's during Homecoming weekend or celebrate a fall visit with a rooftop dinner at The Broken Record, that plan needs a new date, likely sometime in November or December based on the university's own timeline. The Performing Arts Center and the Center for Innovation and Collaboration were the two pieces of The Village most likely to already be open and usable now that the fall semester is underway, so those are the buildings actually worth checking on if you want to see progress in person.
In the meantime, the rest of downtown isn't pausing for The Village to catch up. The Three Trails Music Series keeps bringing free outdoor shows to Canan Commons, and the Muncie Makers Market runs outdoors at Adams and Walnut every first Thursday and indoors at MadJax Maker Force every third Thursday. Neither of those depends on a hotel construction schedule.
The bigger point stands regardless of exact opening dates. This corner of Muncie, tucked against Ball State's campus, is absorbing close to $195 million in new hospitality, cultural, and residential investment, and most of it is landing roughly on schedule even as one piece runs a season behind. That kind of sustained, multi-building investment next to a university is the sort of shift that tends to ripple outward into surrounding blocks over the following few years, not just the buildings themselves.
If you're watching this stretch of Muncie because you already live nearby, or because you're weighing what it might mean for property near campus down the road, The Slavin Property Group tracks these changes as part of daily work in this market. Request Your Free Home Valuation and we'll walk you through what redevelopment like this has historically meant for nearby home values, with the same attention to detail we'd want if it were our own street.
