Walk over to Waterside from the Pelican Bay tram stop this July and the property reads like a construction site with a Dior boutique attached. That is roughly what it is. By the end of this calendar year, the center will hold three new sit-down restaurants that did not exist here in January, a returning Hermès store after a nine-year absence, and a 29,000-square-foot RH campus built into the former Nordstrom footprint.
For most of us who live inside Pelican Bay, Waterside functions less like a shopping destination and more like the neighborhood square. Which means the shape of that square is being redrawn while we watch. This post is a resident's map of what has already opened, what is landing this fall, and what the property will actually feel like when the dust settles in Q4.
The three-restaurant year
The single biggest shift is dining. At the start of 2025, Waterside had one significant sit-down seafood option and a casual Italian chain that had filed for bankruptcy. By the end of this year, the center will operate three new full-service restaurants with essentially zero overlap in format, price point, or menu.
| Restaurant | Address / Location | Opening Window | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eddie V's | 765 Seagate Drive | Summer 2026 | Fine-dining seafood and steaks, live jazz |
| Buck & Rider | Waterside Shops | Late 2026 | Open kitchen, raw bar, indoor-outdoor coastal |
| RH Restaurant | Former Nordstrom parcel | Late 2026 | 174-seat glass atrium, wine service |
That is a meaningful change for anyone who has ever tried to book a Friday dinner without leaving the community. Three evenings a week you could eat at a different concept on the same property and not repeat a cuisine or a room. Eddie V's Naples location is Darden's first in the region, per the operator's confirmation to Gulfshore Business. Buck & Rider is the first location outside the Southwest for a brand out of Scottsdale, with the Naples build being led by Michael Hsu Office of Architecture and MHK Architecture as local partner.
The RH restaurant is the outlier of the three. It is not a stand-alone concept. It sits inside the retail environment, under an elongated glass atrium at the center of six connected galleries, with wine service threaded through the space. Closer to a European gallery restaurant than anything currently on the Waterside roster.
What is already open, right now
Dior stepped out of its long-standing store-within-a-store at Saks on June 11 into a 6,000-square-foot standalone boutique with the full ready-to-wear, accessories, fragrance, and beauty lines. If you shopped Dior at Waterside before, you were shopping a corner of Saks. The new footprint is roughly the size of a small anchor store.
That relocation is the visible edge of a larger reshuffle. Six new stores, three new dining venues, and three renovated spaces are landing at Waterside across the summer and fall, per the property's own leasing announcements. To sweeten the traffic during construction, the center is running a program called "The Squeeze" on Fridays and Saturdays through July and August: complimentary lemonade for guests, no purchase required.
Small thing. Nice thing. Worth knowing if you tram over on a hot Saturday.
The retail reshuffle nobody outside the property is tracking
The bigger operational story is the tenant chess game happening inline. A number of stores are not new to Waterside, but they are moving to bigger footprints or new corners, which means the walk-through you have memorized will not work in November.
- Hermès has returned after a nine-year absence, in a freestanding building described as a tropical-inspired pavilion
- Brunello Cucinelli is taking roughly 4,000 square feet of the former Williams-Sonoma space
- Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma are moving together to a two-story outparcel built into the former Barnes & Noble building
- Anthropologie is relocating within the property to a larger storefront expected to open this fall
- Peter Millar is opening in the former White House Black Market space
- Vuori, the California athletic apparel brand, is planning a fall opening
- Piranesi fine jewelry is opening this fall
Waterside has not yet announced which retailer will fill the longtime space Pottery Barn is vacating, per reporting from Naples Press. Sachse Construction's Chuck Hundley told the paper that Waterside is in conversations with "prominent tenants" for additional 2026 arrivals.
The pattern under all of this is worth naming. The property is systematically splitting older department-store real estate into smaller high-visibility suites, then filling those suites with brands that used to operate as concessions inside Saks. Dior is the clearest example. Brunello Cucinelli is the second.
The RH building is not a store
The most physically dramatic change is on the north edge of the property, on the parcel where Nordstrom sat vacant from 2020 until demolition. RH pulled its construction permit on August 7, 2025, per Collier County records reported by Gulfshore Business. The final site development plan at 5489 Tamiami Trail N. runs 29,382 square feet on a single story and includes six separate galleries with skylights, connected by landscaped courtyards and glass-roofed walkways.
The central 4,143-square-foot restaurant and wine bar under the atrium is the anchor of the whole concept, not an amenity attached to it. Naples-based DeAngelis Diamond is the contractor. Projected debut is late 2026.
Two things about this that matter for a resident:
First, it changes the sight line at the northern entry. The former Nordstrom mass was a windowless box. The RH replacement is oriented around glass, courtyards, and landscaping, which reads much closer to the Mediterranean-style architecture that defines the rest of the center.
Second, RH has confirmed that Naples is arriving before any other East Coast city for this format. Whatever you think of the brand, that is a first-market placement of a design-forward flagship inside a community's walkable radius. It is a rare kind of arrival.
What the fall actually looks like for someone who lives here
If you tram or walk over between now and Thanksgiving, expect the following texture. The northern edge of the property, along the former Nordstrom parcel, will still be an active construction site with sheathing going up on the outparcel building shared by Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma. Interior corridors near the "E" section, where Dior and Brunello Cucinelli sit, are open and finished. The old Williams-Sonoma corner is gone. Anthropologie will move mid-fall. Peter Millar and Vuori are targeting fall openings.
Eddie V's targets a summer opening at 765 Seagate Drive, so a soft opening in August or September is plausible. Buck & Rider and the RH restaurant are both late-2026 targets, which in Naples construction terms usually means the last two months of the year with a real possibility of slipping into Q1 2027.
The lemonade program runs Fridays and Saturdays until Labor Day weekend.
The through-line
If you have lived in Pelican Bay for more than a couple of seasons, you have watched Waterside quietly reposition itself twice: once when Saks was expanded, and again when the outdoor architecture was refreshed with the fountains and royal palms. This is the third reposition, and it is the largest of the three. The property is being rebuilt as a three-restaurant, luxury-flagship district rather than a mall with restaurants attached. The math of an evening changes. So does the reason you drive rather than tram, or tram rather than drive.
For residents already inside the community, that matters more than the marketing does. You are gaining walkable dinner options that previously required a drive to Fifth Avenue South or, in Eddie V's case, a drive to Fort Lauderdale or Tampa. You are also, honestly, going to lose parking spots to construction fencing between now and October. Both things are true at once.
The Naples Philharmonic season at Artis-Naples resumes in the fall, which means the Waterside dinner-then-concert routine that a lot of Pelican Bay households run is about to get considerably more interesting on the dinner side of the ledger. Book early.
If you own a home in Pelican Bay and want a candid read on how the Waterside redevelopment, the RH atrium, and the return of Hermès are influencing buyer interest on your block, reach out to Live in SWFL. Start Your Success Story.
