A Pelican Bay resident who walked to Waterside for coffee last summer and walks over again this July would find a genuinely different property. Brio, the Italian anchor at the north end for almost twenty years, closed on April 12. Six weeks later, Eddie V's Prime Seafood opened its doors on the old US Bank outparcel at 765 Seagate Drive. Dior moved out of its store-within-a-store at Saks and into a standalone boutique. Häagen-Dazs, after twenty-five years on the east edge, served its last cone on May 31.
None of this is renovation in the ordinary sense. The property is being rebuilt around a different premise. For anyone whose front door is inside Pelican Bay's tram map, that premise is worth understanding before the fall openings land.
The thesis, in one line
Waterside was a shopping center with two restaurants attached. By the end of 2026, it will be a dining destination with a luxury retail spine — three non-overlapping sit-down concepts, a fine-dining restaurant inside a home furnishings gallery, and a European fashion lineup that has quietly filled every inline anchor position. That is a different everyday neighborhood.
The three restaurants, in order
The clearest way to see the shift is to look at what the property offered for dinner a year ago against what it will offer by December.
| Concept | Format | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Eddie V's Prime Seafood | Fine-dining seafood and prime steaks, live jazz in the V Lounge | Open since June 7, 2026 |
| Buck & Rider | Casual-luxe seafood, open kitchen, indoor-outdoor flow | Late 2026, replacing Brio at 5505 Tamiami Trail N. |
| RH Restaurant | Full-service restaurant and wine bar under a glass atrium, inside RH Naples | Late 2026 |
Eddie V's is the one already worth planning around. The property's own announcement lists Sunday through Thursday hours from 4 to 9 p.m. and Fridays and Saturdays until 10, with the V Lounge running live music trios nightly. The Naples opening is the first Darden Restaurants location of the brand in Southwest Florida, which matters less as trivia than as a signal about who the property is now courting.
Buck & Rider is the next domino. Adam Strecker, the founder of Hi Noon Hospitality, has publicly targeted November 2026 for the opening, framing it as the brand's first location outside its Arizona base and its first east of the Mississippi. The Brio space is being extensively renovated, not lightly turned. A resident who has walked past the papered-over windows on Tamiami Trail N. for the last three months can expect that to continue through the summer.
The third piece is the one most likely to surprise people. RH Naples, on the demolished Nordstrom footprint, is not simply a furniture store. County-approved plans describe a single-story, 29,382-square-foot building with six separate galleries connected by landscaped courtyards and glass-roofed walkways, arranged around a 4,143-square-foot restaurant and wine bar beneath a glass atrium. The opening date has not been confirmed by RH, but construction permits were issued in August 2025 and the target remains late 2026.
Three concepts, three price points, three formats. A resident could eat dinner at each in the same week without repeating a room.
The retail spine, quietly reset
The restaurants get the headlines. The retail change is the one that has already happened, largely without an announcement cycle.
- Hermès returned to Waterside after a nine-year absence, in a freestanding tropical-pavilion-style store.
- Dior opened its standalone boutique this summer, relocating out of its Saks Fifth Avenue concession.
- Brunello Cucinelli launched at the end of 2025 in roughly 4,000 square feet of the former Williams Sonoma inline space, adjacent to Dior.
- Lafayette 148 opened a 3,020-square-foot freestanding boutique.
- Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn moved together into the two-story outparcel that Barnes & Noble occupied for more than thirty years. Barnes & Noble itself relocated about a mile south to Park Shore Plaza after pulling out of the Waterside space in July 2024.
More is scheduled to land this fall. Vuori, the California activewear brand, is set to open next to Sephora. Peter Millar takes the former White House Black Market space. Piranesi, a fine jewelry maison, opens across from Dior in a small 781-square-foot unit near Gucci. Anthropologie is relocating within the property into a larger storefront.
The jewelry and watch cluster is being reshuffled at the same time. Omega is scheduled to move into a smaller 1,848-square-foot unit near Santa Fe Café in late 2026 or early 2027, and its current 2,519-square-foot space is being taken over by Van Cleef & Arpels. If you have been buying watches at Waterside for a decade, the door you walk through next year will be a different door.
What's leaving, and why it's the same story
Losses matter as much as arrivals when the property's identity is being rewritten.
Brio's departure was not a rent dispute. Its parent company, Bravo Brio Restaurants, filed for its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy in five years in August 2025. The Naples location closed on April 12, 2026, and the same corporate collapse ended Bravo's run at Mercato early last July, with Violi Mediterranean taking its place there this fall.
Häagen-Dazs closed on May 31 after its lease was not renewed. The owner of the local franchise since 2021, Nabila Zafar, is keeping her Coastland Center location running but has vacated Waterside. L'Occitane en Provence exited this spring for a new tenant.
The pattern behind all three exits is the same one behind Nordstrom's 2020 closure and Barnes & Noble's 2024 exit. Each format faltered somewhere else in the country before it faltered here, and the Forbes Company chose replacements from a different playbook — first-to-region concepts, returning European fashion houses, destination retail organized around courtyards and wine service. The Naples Press has been documenting each move in detail, and the trajectory is consistent.
A small note on summer
If you have been avoiding Waterside during the July heat, there is one modest incentive to walk over anyway. Through July and August, the property has a traveling beverage cart offering complimentary lemonade during peak hours on Fridays and Saturdays. It is a small gesture, and characteristic of how the ownership is positioning the property right now — as somewhere residents linger, not somewhere they pull in and pull out.
That characterization is worth taking seriously. Waterside sits at the southeast corner of Pelican Bay, and the community's own foundation counts it, along with the Marketplace at Pelican Bay, among the retail resources that make daily life inside the community work. When the anchor property's dining changes from one Italian chain and one steakhouse to three distinct destination concepts, that is not a marketing story. It is a change in what living here looks like on a Tuesday night.
What this means before the fall openings land
For residents thinking ahead to season, a few things are worth marking on the calendar. Eddie V's is already taking reservations through OpenTable and is likely to be difficult to book on weekend evenings by November. Vuori, Peter Millar, and Piranesi are all fall 2026 openings; if a specific store draws you, expect the first weeks of season to be crowded. RH and Buck & Rider are both late 2026 targets, which in construction terms means anything from Thanksgiving to early spring. And if you have been shopping Omega for a piece, the current storefront is on borrowed time.
Beyond the property line, Pelican Bay's cultural anchor is running its own season around the same schedule. Artis—Naples opens its Masterworks series on October 29 and 30 with Alexander Shelley conducting the Naples Philharmonic in Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto and Brahms' First. Between a dinner at Eddie V's and a concert at Hayes Hall, the case for staying inside Pelican Bay on a Friday night is stronger than it has been in a decade.
If you are thinking about how any of these shifts affect the value of a residence in Pelican Bay, Bay Colony, or the broader Waterside-adjacent corridor, the team at Abby Fraga is happy to talk it through. Let's Connect.
