Walk the loop from Saks past the fountains this July and the property reads like a construction diagram half-filled in. Scaffolding at the north end. A finished Dior storefront where a temporary graphic stood in April. Painted plywood announcing three tenants that were not here last season. For anyone who treats the center as a weekly errand, the interesting question is not what's under wraps. It is what the finished picture looks like, and how it changes the way a Pelican Bay evening is spent.
The short version: by the end of the year, Waterside will have gone from one meaningful sit-down restaurant to three, and roughly half a dozen brands that used to live inside a department store will operate their own freestanding rooms. That is a structural change, not a refresh.
What is open right this week
Dior is the headline that has already landed. The house stepped out of its longtime store-within-a-store model at Saks Fifth Avenue on June 11 into a 6,000-square-foot standalone suite carrying its fashion, accessories, fragrance, and beauty lines. If you shopped Dior at Waterside in April, you did it inside Saks. If you shop it in July, you walk in through your own front door.
Anthropologie's fall relocation is announced with construction walls. Vuori, the California athletic brand, is behind a temporary storefront graphic with a fall open date. Peter Millar is taking the former White House Black Market space with its premium sportswear and golf apparel. Piranesi has confirmed a fall 2026 opening for its fine jewelry store, located near Gucci at 5435-19 Tamiami Trail N. Hermès has returned to the property after a nine-year absence, occupying a freestanding tropical-inspired pavilion. Brunello Cucinelli's buildout began this summer after construction documents were approved July 28, filling part of the former inline Williams Sonoma footprint.
For the summer months themselves, the center is running a guest program called The Squeeze. Complimentary lemonade is offered Fridays and Saturdays through July and August 2026. Small gesture, but the kind of detail worth knowing before you park.
The retail floor is being unbundled
The pattern under all of this is easier to see if you stop reading tenant names and look at where the tenants are moving from. Dior, Brunello Cucinelli, Pottery Barn, and Williams Sonoma are all leaving inline or embedded positions for larger, more visible boxes. Dior and Brunello Cucinelli soon replace the former Williams Sonoma space inside the mall, while Williams Sonoma itself is relocating into a two-story outparcel it will share with Pottery Barn, built on the former Barnes & Noble footprint. The old Pottery Barn slot has not been assigned a tenant yet, though the leasing team has told local trade press that more announcements are queued for 2026.
Read that sequence carefully and the logic is not "add stores." It is "give the strongest brands their own architecture." A visitor who spent five minutes inside Saks to reach Dior now spends those five minutes in a room designed by Dior. That is a different kind of shopping trip, and it changes foot traffic patterns across the entire center.
Three restaurants, three formats, one property
The most consequential change is on the dining side. Look at where the center started the year and where it lands by December:
| Sit-down dining tier | Start of 2025 | End of 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Fine dining, wine-forward | none | Eddie V's |
| Fresh seafood, indoor-outdoor | none | Buck & Rider |
| Gallery restaurant, wine bar | none | RH Naples |
| Casual chain | Brio Italian Grille (in bankruptcy filing) | replaced/uncertain |
Three concepts, no overlap in price point, format, or menu identity. That is not a repositioning. That is the creation of a dining district on 29 acres.
Eddie V's is Darden's fine-dining concept, known for live jazz and a serious wine program. The Naples location at 765 Seagate Drive is the brand's first in the region, and the contractor supervising the buildout has said the target is early 2026, though a summer 2026 open is now the operative timeline on the Waterside announcement.
Buck & Rider is the Scottsdale seafood house from Hi Noon Hospitality. Naples will be its first location outside the Southwest, slated for late 2026. The design is a collaboration between the Michael Hsu Office of Architecture and Naples-based MHK Architecture, built around an open kitchen, an expansive raw bar, and indoor-outdoor seating. CEO Adam Strecker has told Gulf Shore Business he is pushing hard for a fourth-quarter open. Fish flown in daily is the operating premise.
RH Naples occupies the former Nordstrom footprint at 5489 Tamiami Trail N. The permit was issued August 7, 2025, and the projected opening is near the end of 2026. The building runs 29,382 square feet across six galleries with skylights, connected by landscaped courtyards and glass-roofed walkways, with outdoor seating and fountains. The center of the plan is a 4,143-square-foot, 174-seat restaurant and wine bar under an elongated glass atrium. It is closer to a European gallery restaurant than to anything currently on the Waterside roster, and Naples is being served before any East Coast RH restaurant city.
For a Pelican Bay resident, the practical read is simple: three evenings a week, you can eat at a different concept inside the same property and not repeat a cuisine, a price point, or a room.
Through July and August, the center is offering complimentary lemonade on Fridays and Saturdays under a program called The Squeeze. It is the only thing here you don't need to plan ahead for.
What this actually changes about a Pelican Bay evening
The center sits at the southeast corner of Pelican Bay, close enough that a resident walks or rides in. That geography has been true for years. What has not been true, until now, is that dinner at Waterside was a real answer to "where should we go."
Consider what changes:
- A Tuesday dinner reservation stops being a downtown decision. The traffic on US-41 south, the parking at Third Street or Fifth Avenue South, the wait at any of the walkable Old Naples rooms — all of that becomes optional rather than default.
- Out-of-town guests who used to be routed to Third Street can be entertained inside a five-minute drive. Eddie V's for a formal night, Buck & Rider for a raw-bar lunch, the RH restaurant for a slower afternoon that folds into showroom browsing.
- The property adds a wine-forward destination in each of three formats. The overlap with existing Pelican Bay club dining is low, because the club rooms are private and these are not.
Retail follows the same logic. A resident who wanted to see Hermès leather in person used to fly to Bal Harbour or Palm Beach. A resident who wanted to see the current RH interior program in built form had to drive to a gallery elsewhere in the state. Both trips shorten to the length of a walk across the parking court.
A few practical notes for the rest of the summer
- Parking flows are shifting. The active construction on the RH site sits at the north end of the property near the former Nordstrom. If you usually enter from Seagate Drive expecting the old traffic pattern, budget a few extra minutes.
- Some inline spaces are transitional. The Pottery Barn spot inside the mall will be vacant once its outparcel opens, and the tenant that replaces it has not been announced. Expect construction walls to persist into fall.
- Bring cash or a card for The Squeeze if you're inclined to tip the staff running it. The lemonade itself is complimentary Fridays and Saturdays through August.
- Reservations for Eddie V's and Buck & Rider will open closer to their launch dates. Neither has published a booking window at the time of writing. RH does not typically take reservations for its cafe format, though the Naples atrium restaurant is a larger and more formal room than the standard RH cafe.
The pace of change here is unusual for a property that has already held its market position for two decades. The Forbes Company, which manages Waterside, has treated the last twelve months as a repositioning cycle: three demolition sites, three new restaurants, six new stores, three renovations, and the return of a fashion house that left almost a decade ago. The result on the ground is that a resident who last spent an evening at the center in March will find a materially different property in November.
That is worth a fresh walk-through. Bring a shopping list you actually need, and stay for dinner once one of the three rooms is open.
If you own a residence in Pelican Bay and are thinking about how neighborhood-adjacent development affects value, presentation, or timing, Michael Moreiras is available for a private conversation. Let's Connect.
