We did some research and found that this is by-design implementation. The reported behavior is due to the fact, that for a nested property binding the GetCellContent method is not used. It is used for performance optimizations so that the value of the TextBlock is retrieved directly. In case there is a nested property, the built-in Binding mechanism provided by the framework is used. The only option that may be offered for such customizations is to override the CreateCellElement method, instead of overriding the GetCellContent one, and return a TextBlock with its Text property set to be the hard-coded value. You can also inherit GridViewColumn instead of GridViewBoundColumnBase since it will not use the binding of the column.