The tram runs the same route it always has. Eight stations, mangroves, the soft mechanical hum out to the sand. What has shifted this month sits at the other end of the property, at the southeast corner where the boardwalks give way to Tamiami Trail and the Waterside Shops entrance. If you have not walked the loop since May, the tenant map has moved under your feet.
This is not a seasonal refresh. Six new stores, three new dining rooms, and three renovations are landing between now and early 2027, and the sequencing tells a specific story about where the center is heading.
The thesis, stated plainly
Waterside has spent the last decade as a familiar anchor: Saks, Nordstrom, a Barnes & Noble, dinner options that skewed reliable over ambitious. The current wave of leases pushes the center harder into the luxury tier that Pelican Bay residents actually shop when they travel. The moves are not cosmetic. They are a repositioning, and they are worth understanding before your next dinner reservation or Saturday errand.
What has already opened
Two names are on the ground as of this month.
- Dior, which used to live as a store-within-a-store inside Saks Fifth Avenue, has opened a standalone boutique on the property. The brand now sits behind its own glass rather than sharing floor space with a department-store beauty hall.
- Eddie V's Prime Seafood is open and anchoring the dining additions planned across the rest of the year. It is the first of three new food options.
If you have been out of town for the summer, those are the two that will look different the next time you park.
The fall arrivals, in the order they land
The rest of the reshuffle is dated and specific. This is the calendar as it stands:
| Tenant | Space | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Vuori | New storefront | Fall 2026 |
| Anthropologie | Larger relocated storefront | Fall 2026 |
| Peter Millar | Former White House Black Market space, ~2,517 sq ft | Fall 2026 |
| Piranesi | 781 sq ft across from Dior, formerly Gulf Coast International Properties | Fall 2026 |
| Omega | New 1,848 sq ft unit near Santa Fe Café | Late 2026 / early 2027 |
| Van Cleef & Arpels | Omega's current 2,519 sq ft space | After Omega vacates |
Two of those are worth flagging for anyone who tracks retail as a signal rather than a shopping list.
The Omega and Van Cleef shuffle is the tell
Watch what is happening at the jewelry end of the property. Omega is downsizing from 2,519 square feet to 1,848 square feet and moving nearer to Santa Fe Café. The 2,519-square-foot box it leaves behind is being taken over by Van Cleef & Arpels. That is not a rotation of equals. It is a landlord upgrading the tenant inside the same square footage, and it is happening across from a newly standalone Dior and a first-time-in-Naples Piranesi fine jewelry store.
Four watch and jewelry houses now cluster within a short walk of one another. That is a decision about who the center is courting for the next lease cycle, and it changes the character of the wing.
Peter Millar taking the old White House Black Market footprint moves in the same direction. The specialty golf and resort apparel brand is a natural fit for a community whose residents rotate between Club Pelican Bay's 27 holes, the Ritz-Carlton next door, and the courses further inland. That lease reads as the center trading a mall-standard tenant for one calibrated to the ZIP code.
Vuori and Anthropologie soften the mix. Vuori's California athleisure lands well with the tennis-and-pickleball contingent that fills the community's 26 hydro courts and 20 pickleball courts. Anthropologie is expanding rather than leaving, which is quietly the more interesting piece: retailers do not enlarge a store in a soft center.
How the daily loop changes
Most Pelican Bay households do not think about Waterside as a destination. They think about it as the last stop on a routine that starts at the beach and ends with dinner. The reshuffle bends that routine in small ways worth naming.
If your afternoon ends at Sandbar, the Foundation's newly renovated South Beach kitchen with sliding glass walls to the Gulf, dinner at Waterside is a five-minute drive against the sunset traffic. If you finish at Marker 36 on the north end, the Ritz side of the property is closer, but the tram-then-car sequence still lands you at Waterside inside twenty minutes. Eddie V's opening gives that loop a new terminal point that is not another steak-and-wedge-salad room. Combined with the existing anchors, the after-beach reservation calculus has widened.
The tram itself is worth remembering as infrastructure. The Foundation's drivers log more than 900,000 trips a year across the eight stations along the raised berm. That is the volume that makes Waterside feel like an extension of the community rather than an off-property errand. Nothing in the new tenant mix changes that geometry. It only sharpens what the tram is delivering you to.
The bigger frame: Naples Grande goes offline in the spring
Waterside is not the only property in the immediate footprint that is moving. The Naples Grande Beach Resort at Pelican Bay's southern border begins a comprehensive renovation on April 1, 2026, with a reopening planned by year's end. The 474-room resort is reworking guest rooms, dining, the lobby, spa, and pool and event spaces. Rhode's End restaurant, Clam Pass beach services, the Naples Tennis Academy, and Naples Grande Golf Club stay operational during construction, so the day-to-day access residents rely on does not go dark.
The relevance to Waterside is indirect but real. For roughly nine months, one of the two vacation-resort anchors that sit on either end of Pelican Bay will be under wraps. The Ritz-Carlton on the north end will absorb some of that displaced traffic. Waterside will absorb the rest. If the fall opens with new dining rooms landing at the same time the southern resort's food and beverage program is dormant, the center's tables will run tighter than usual through the winter.
Book earlier than you did last season. That is the practical read.
What to try first
For residents drafting a short list, the ordering is straightforward.
- Eddie V's, because it is the only fully new dining room open right now, and it will be the hardest reservation to hold once the northern snowbird calendar reactivates in November.
- Dior's standalone boutique, if only to see how the merchandising reads outside of the Saks context. The store-within-a-store version had different edit priorities.
- Sandbar, if you have not been down since the renovation. The sliding-glass-to-beach configuration is a different room than the one that closed for the work.
Peter Millar, Vuori, Anthropologie's larger footprint, and Piranesi are worth pinning for a mid-fall visit. Omega and Van Cleef will resolve into their new spaces closer to next season.
A quieter observation
Waterside has never needed to reinvent itself. The center sits inside a community where residents own homes across roughly 95 enclaves along a three-mile stretch of Gulf frontage, and the built-in demand has always cushioned tenant risk. What is happening this summer is different in kind. The landlord is using a soft moment in national retail to trade up the roster, and the timing overlaps with a major resort renovation that will push more of Pelican Bay's daily rhythm through the center for the better part of a year.
You will feel it first at the restaurants. Then at the jewelry wing. Then, quietly, in the small ways your Saturday morning routes reorganize themselves around a slightly different set of storefronts.
If you are considering a move within Pelican Bay, thinking about a rental strategy for the season, or weighing what the resort renovation and the retail reshuffle mean for your own address, The Higdon Team advises clients across Pelican Bay, Bay Colony, and the broader Naples coastal corridor. Request a private consultation and we will walk the property with you.
