Waterside Shops And Artis—Naples: What's Changing At Pelican Bay's Front Door

If your morning walk ends with an iced coffee at Waterside, you've already noticed. The construction fences on the north edge, the Dior banner where a Saks concession used to be, the smell of new asphalt near Seagate Drive. What looks like a routine refresh is actually a full repositioning of the mall and the cultural campus next door. Between June 2026 and spring 2027, the southeast corner of Pelican Bay is being rebuilt into something residents will use very differently than they did two seasons ago.

The Short Version

Waterside Shops is not adding a few tenants. It is swapping out roughly a third of its footprint, replacing spaces vacated by Nordstrom, Barnes & Noble, Brio, and a Bank of America private banking office with concepts that in several cases do not yet exist anywhere else in Southwest Florida. Artis—Naples, a five-minute walk from Waterside's north entrance, has locked in a 2026-27 season with the biggest touring Broadway title in a decade and a full Beethoven symphony cycle. For a resident who has watched this mall settle into a comfortable pattern since the last Nordstrom-era buildout, the practical result 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.

What Actually Opened This Summer

Eddie V's Prime Seafood opened June 7 at 765 Seagate Drive, on the southwest corner. Darden demolished the old Bank of America Private Bank office down to the steel frame and built 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. Reservations are recommended but not required. Valet service is available. Happy hour in the V Lounge is 4 to 6:30 p.m. daily, and live music trios play nightly. For anyone who has been to the Capital Grille on Tamiami, this is a deliberately different room. The Capital Grille has the feel of a stately private club open to the public as a classic chophouse featuring dry-aged steaks for intimate dining. Eddie V's, on the other hand, is a vibrant, more contemporary seafood-forward restaurant featuring live jazz and a high-energy lounge scene.

Dior left its store-within-a-store at Saks on June 11 and opened a 6,000-square-foot suite across the promenade. Hermès returned to Waterside after a nine-year absence, occupying a freestanding store with a tropical-inspired pavilion.

If you have been avoiding the north end because of the construction hoardings, that's the RH campus, and it will occupy the balance of this year's disruption.

What Lands This Fall

Six more tenants are targeted for fall openings before season peaks. The concentration matters: this is not one anchor moving in, it is a coordinated repositioning of the inline suites.

The former Barnes & Noble outparcel, which had sat empty since Barnes & Noble pulled out in July 2024, retreating from mall formats during a corporate restructuring, has been rebuilt as a two-story building sharing Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn. Both are relocating from inline spaces they occupied for years.

The second restaurant slot is where things get interesting. Buck & Rider is taking the Brio Tuscan Grille address, which had occupied the same Waterside address for nearly twenty years before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2025. Buck & Rider is a Scottsdale seafood concept with a raw bar and a fish market inside the dining room, and this will be its first Florida location.

The RH Question

The largest single change is the site behind the north fence. Nordstrom closed in 2020 and left a 74,591 square feet, vacant since 2020 hole in the northern edge. What is rising on the pad is not a department-store replacement. It is an RH gallery-plus-restaurant campus of 29,382 square feet, with six separate galleries with skylights connecting through landscaped courtyards and glass-roofed walkways, surrounding a central 4,143-square-foot, full-service restaurant and wine bar beneath an elongated glass atrium.

The number to pay attention to inside that plan is 174. That is the seat count for the restaurant under the atrium, and it is roughly equivalent to a mid-sized standalone fine-dining room. County construction permits were issued in August 2025, and the projected timeline points to late 2026.

For residents who use Waterside as a regular dining address, the practical shift is this: three evenings a week, you could eat at a different concept within the same property and not repeat a cuisine, a price point, or a room.

That is the sentence worth holding onto. It changes what "going out" means for someone who lives inside the Foundation gates.

Across The Boulevard: Artis—Naples In 2026-27

Waterside is the retail half. The other half of Pelican Bay's southeast corner is Artis—Naples on Pelican Bay Boulevard, and the 2026-27 lineup released in May is the strongest single season the campus has announced in years.

The Broadway series alone is worth the subscription math. Hamilton runs November 24–29, 2026 with performances Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday–Sunday at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Death Becomes Her follows December 29, 2026 through January 3, 2027, the Tony Award-winning musical comedy based on the 1992 film with direction and choreography by Christopher Gattelli.

The classical and pops calendar carries the rest of the season:

• Yo-Yo Ma at Artis—Naples on January 8
• Sutton Foster and Kelli O'Hara with the Naples Philharmonic on January 16 in Hayes Hall, conducted by Michael Rafter, in an evening inspired by Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett's 1962 Carnegie Hall TV special
• Another Evening with Itzhak Perlman on March 11 in Hayes Hall, a multimedia program with pianist Rohan de Silva marking Perlman's 80th birthday
• Michael Feinstein on March 10 in "My Celebration: Johnny Mathis & Henry Mancini Magical Music"
• Paul Anka on March 21 at 7 p.m. in Hayes Hall

For anyone who has watched the Naples Philharmonic grow under its current artistic direction, the anchor of the season is the Beethoven cycle. Alexander Shelley conducts Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 2 on March 4, 2027, a program devoted to Beethoven's early symphonies that reveals the composer's growing ambition. On March 6, Shelley leads Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, "Eroica," a work that redefined the possibilities of the symphonic form, before the light and exuberant Fourth Symphony. March 18 pairs the Fifth Symphony with the Sixth, "Pastorale," a five-movement depiction of peaceful countryside scenes interrupted by a brief yet powerful thunderstorm. Completing all nine symphonies inside a single subscription season is unusual for a regional orchestra and is worth understanding before the good seats disappear.

The Baker Museum programming aligns with the concert calendar. Baron Wolman: Capturing the Sound of an Era opens October 2026 and runs through June 2027, celebrating the trailblazing first chief photographer of Rolling Stone magazine, whose lens immortalized Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The concurrent Tate loan is the larger institutional coup: The Surrealist International: Fifty Years of Dreams draws from the collection of Tate, United Kingdom, with works by Eileen Agar, Jean Arp, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Dorothea Tanning.

How To Use This If You Live Here

A few practical takes for residents already inside the gates.

• The July and August lemonade cart is not a joke. Waterside is running complimentary lemonade Fridays and Saturdays through July and August from a traveling beverage cart during peak hours at 5415 Tamiami Trail N. If you have been avoiding the mall because of the summer heat and the construction, this is a low-friction way to walk the property and see what has actually opened.
• Book Hamilton and the Beethoven weekends now. These are the two events most likely to sell through subscription blocks before single tickets go on sale. If you have guests coming for Thanksgiving, the November 27–29 Hamilton performances overlap the holiday weekend.
• Watch the RH restaurant. A 174-seat wine-service concept opening under a glass atrium, walking distance from Bay Colony and the Pelican Bay Foundation gates, is going to change reservation patterns at every other high-end room within a five-mile radius. If it opens on schedule at the end of 2026, expect a season one waiting list.
• The private beach clubs still win for lunch. Marker 36 and Sandbar are situated on the Gulf providing an airy, bright, open atmosphere with views of the white sand beach and sunsets, alongside appetizers or dinner with a cocktail or glass of wine. None of the Waterside changes replace that midday routine. They expand what happens after 5 p.m.

The point of tracking all of this in one place is not to celebrate construction. It is to notice that a neighborhood most residents chose for the beach, the tennis, and the tram is quietly becoming one of the most concentrated luxury retail and cultural corners in the state. That was not the case in 2020. It will be very much the case by spring 2027.

If you want a candid read on what these changes mean for your specific address inside Pelican Bay, whether you own at Bay Colony, in the low-rises off Gulf Park Drive, or in one of the Foundation villas, the team at Gulf Coast Advisors works this corner of Naples every day. Request a Concierge Consultation and we will walk you through it over coffee at whichever Waterside address is open that morning.