What's New at Waterside Shops and Pelican Bay This Season
For years, Waterside Shops functioned as a Saturday errand. You walked over from the boardwalk for a Williams Sonoma pan, a Saks handbag, a bowl of something at Brio, and you were home before the beach umbrellas went up. That pattern is quietly being rewired. By the end of 2026, three of the four buildings that framed the property will house tenants that did not exist there a year ago, and the reason to walk over shifts from midday retail to evening rooms.
If you live in one of the towers along Pelican Bay Boulevard or a villa off Oakmont Parkway, the practical implication is a wider daily radius. Here is what has already opened, what arrives before the season peaks, and a few changes off the Waterside footprint that will show up in your week whether you shop or not.
The most visible change is on the southwest corner of the property. Eddie V's Prime Seafood opened June 7 at 765 Seagate Drive, on the pad where Bank of America Private Bank once stood. Darden demolished everything but the steel frame and rebuilt a 9,896-square-foot restaurant with patio dining and three private rooms. Dinner runs 4 to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 4 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with happy hour in the V Lounge from 4 to 6:30 p.m. daily and live music trios most nights.
Two things worth knowing before you book. First, Eddie V's is a sibling of The Capital Grille, which has been on U.S. 41 since 2008, but the format is different. Capital Grille reads as a quiet chophouse; Eddie V's leans seafood-forward with a lounge scene and jazz on stage, so the two are not interchangeable evenings. Second, the floor plan is genuinely large. County plans describe 361 seats across a main hall, speakeasy, stage-equipped bar, wine room, and two private dining rooms, which is why weeknight walk-ins have generally worked when weekends have not.
If you have not walked the north loop since the winter, the disorientation is deliberate. Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn reopened January 23, 2026 inside the two-story building on the northwest corner of U.S. 41 and Seagate, the former Barnes & Noble outparcel. Both stores were previously inline; the move consolidated them into a freestanding shell with second-floor patio-furniture display.
The 5,888-square-foot suite Williams Sonoma vacated is now the address of a Dior standalone flagship, which stepped out of its old store-within-a-store at Saks on June 11 into a 6,000-square-foot suite. Hermès has also returned to Waterside after a nine-year absence, taking a freestanding building with a tropical-inspired pavilion, and Brunello Cucinelli is building out the adjacent footprint. The former Ann Taylor unit is being reworked into an 8,500-square-foot Anthropologie relocating from the northern edge of the property.
Four more names are on the fall board:
The pattern under those moves is what changes the neighborhood feel. Inline department-store departments are being pulled out into visible, dedicated storefronts, and the co-tenancy tightens toward luxury and premium apparel rather than mall-standard fashion.
Two arrivals are worth pacing yourself for. Buck & Rider, a Scottsdale-based seafood concept from Hi Noon Hospitality, is targeting a November 2026 opening in the longtime Brio space, which sat empty after Brio Italian Grille filed for Chapter 11 in August 2025. It will be the group's first restaurant outside the Southwest.
The larger swing is RH Naples, projected to open near the end of 2026 on the former Nordstrom footprint that has been vacant since 2020. The build covers 29,382 square feet across six galleries connected by landscaped walkways and glass-roofed courtyards, with a 4,143-square-foot, 174-seat restaurant and wine bar under a central atrium. Read together with Eddie V's and Buck & Rider, that means three genuinely new sit-down concepts inside the same property by year end, none of them repeating a cuisine or a room. For anyone who uses Waterside as a regular dining address, that is the meaningful shift.
The second-most consequential change to daily life this year has nothing to do with retail. Sunshine Ace Hardware held a two-day grand opening on January 24 and 25, 2026 at Pelican Bay Marketplace, co-anchoring the plaza with Publix. For anyone who has been driving up to Vanderbilt or over to Airport-Pulling for a light bulb or a hurricane bolt, the Saturday morning math just shortened.
The bigger physical change is under your feet. The Pelican Bay Beach renourishment was funded by the Pelican Bay Services Division rather than public dollars, since the beach is not public, and crews trucked beach-quality sand from Stewart Mining in Immokalee. Sand was spread across 2.9 miles of Vanderbilt Beach and Pelican Bay Beach between reference monuments R-22+300 near the Bluebill Avenue access and R-37+000 about 1,000 feet south of the Pelican Bay North Pavilion. If your tram stop feels wider than it did last April, that is why.
The item still open at the south end of the community is what happens next door at Naples Grande Beach Resort. The resort has proposed a pool with water slides and other structures, described by Naples Grande as an amenity and by neighbors as a water park. Over two days of hearings in March 2026, residents heard from the design review board and from officials arguing against the plans, and Pelican Bay homeowners have raised objections around noise, traffic, parking, and neighborhood character. The next public hearing is the one to put on the calendar.
The Naples Philharmonic's summer calendar was thinner than February's Masterworks lineup but not empty, with recent programs including Chuck Redd's All That Jazz with the Naples Philharmonic Jazz Orchestra on July 8 and a Chi-Town Transit Authority Chicago tribute on July 21. The fall picks up quickly.
Artis—Naples enters its 2026-27 season as its third under Artistic and Music Director Alexander Shelley, and the Masterworks series presents 13 concerts including all nine Beethoven symphonies across two weeks. Two anchors on the early calendar are worth flagging now if you plan to have houseguests before Thanksgiving. Mandy Gonzalez performs with the Naples Philharmonic Pops November 3 through 7 in Hayes Hall under Principal Pops conductor Jack Everly, drawing on her Broadway work from In the Heights, Wicked, and Hamilton. Then Hamilton itself runs at Hayes Hall November 24 through 29, with performances on Tuesday, Wednesday matinee and evening, Friday evening, and Saturday and Sunday matinee and evening.
Both are walking distance from the towers along Pelican Bay Boulevard, which is the point. The Baker Museum extends its hours on Hamilton days from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., so an early museum visit and Heidi's Place before curtain is a real Tuesday evening rather than a special occasion.
The changes above are not a redecoration. They are a repositioning. Waterside Shops has closed department-store-era footprints at Nordstrom, Barnes & Noble, U.S. Trust, and Brio, and is refilling them with concepts that generate evening traffic and repeat weekly use, not once-a-season purchases. Combined with the Sunshine Ace addition at the Marketplace, the widened beach, and a full Artis season across the boulevard, more of the reasons to leave Pelican Bay in a given week now sit inside its walking radius than at any point in the last decade.
For most residents, that means the same golf-cart trip covers more of the day. For anyone thinking about the community from farther out, it is the kind of quiet infrastructure change that tends to show up in how the neighborhood feels long before it shows up in any headline number.
If you have questions about how any of these changes affect your particular building or block, or you would like to walk through what a shift like this tends to mean for the way a neighborhood lives day to day, Michelle Trawick is glad to talk. Let's Connect.
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