And when L.L. Bean, the woodsy yuppy retailer, decided last year to set foot outside Maine for the first time, it chose a 65,000-square-foot space in Tysons. It features an indoor waterfall, a climbing wall and a fully stocked trout pond.

Pennsylvania-based Toll Brothers Inc. is building thousands of luxury apartments and houses across Northern Virginia. "If you have to choose your site [in the Washington area], you're looking at Virginia first," said Steve McLeaf, an assistant vice president at Toll Brothers Realty Trust. "Northern Virginia is a destination the destination."

It's not so much that Northern Virginia has it all, McLeaf said "there is no McLean Opera"—it's more that Fairfax and surrounding communities mean something different in the region.

"I think people still rely on the city, both practically and from a status standpoint," he said. "But the stigma has been lifted in Northern Virginia because of the type of people and the type of jobs."

Longtime Northern Virginians recognize the change. Steve Zarpas, a McLean High School graduate, recalled an upbringing awash in the southern accents and rural sensibilities of old Virginia.

"Guys used to have rebel flags flying from their pickup trucks when I was in high school" in the '70s, he said. "Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers were the big bands. Now it's rap and ska. . . . The breadth of the growth and change is truly shocking."

Consider Zarpas himself: He was a fixture on the D.C. club scene for nearly two decades as the owner of Crow Bar, 15 Minutes Nightclub and the Dixie Grill. But he continued to live in Northern Virginia for most of that time and, sensing a seismic shift, he and a partner opened a hot-wired, Internet-themed Fairfax hangout in 1999 called the Revolution Coffee Lounge.

The cafe is far outside the Beltway in Herndon, a former farming community now engulfed in a sea of building cranes working feverishly at the nexus of the Dulles high-tech corridor.