Drive past the corner of U.S. 41 North and Seagate Drive this month and Waterside Shops looks mostly like the mall you remember. Saks Fifth Avenue still anchors the north end. The fountains still run under the royal palms. Then you get to the edges of the property, and three separate corners tell a different story: a restaurant that didn't exist two months ago is running a wait list for happy hour, a department store that sat empty since 2020 is wrapped in construction fencing and gallery renderings, and a stretch of parking that used to belong to a bank branch now has valet.

None of these changes is happening in isolation. Waterside Shops is being rebuilt from three separate corners at the same time, on a timeline that runs through the end of this year, and the pattern across those three corners says more about where Naples retail is headed than any single opening does on its own.

Three Restaurants, No Overlap

Before this redevelopment cycle started, none of these three parcels held a sit-down restaurant that was still open. One was a bank branch. One was a bankrupt Italian chain. One was a vacant department store. By the end of 2026, all three will be restaurants, and none of them will compete for the same table.

Eddie V's is the first Southwest Florida location for the Darden Restaurants brand, and it opened on the southwest outparcel at 765 Seagate Drive with the fine-dining tier Waterside had not offered before. Buck & Rider, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based concept, will take over the space Brio held for two decades on the mall's northern end, a lease that ended after Bravo Brio's second bankruptcy filing in five years. RH Restaurant sits inside a much larger project: a one-story, 29,382-square-foot gallery with six connected showrooms and skylights, built on a footprint less than half the size of the Nordstrom it replaces, with the restaurant itself framed by a glass atrium at the center of the galleries.

What Already Changed This Summer

If you have shopped at Waterside in the last few months, you have already seen part of this play out. Dior opened a standalone boutique this summer after years operating as a store-within-a-store inside Saks Fifth Avenue. Eddie V's opened on schedule in June, with a wine list built around more than 300 selections and live jazz nightly in its V Lounge. The mall is also running a lighter touch through the season: a lemonade cart is out on the property Friday and Saturday afternoons through July and August, a small gesture aimed squarely at the residents who are still shopping here while the tourist traffic thins.

Not every change this summer was an opening. Häagen-Dazs closed at the end of May after 25 years on the property. The owner, Nabila Zafar, had run the local franchise since 2021, and she told Naples Press what the closing actually looked like from her side of the counter:

"After 25 wonderful years serving ice cream and smiles at the Waterside Shops, our lease is not being renewed, and we've been asked to vacate the location by May 31, 2026."

Zafar is continuing to operate a Häagen-Dazs location at Coastland Center, so the closure is a lease decision by the mall, not a business failure. L'Occitane en Provence closed this spring for the same reason: not underperformance, but a landlord clearing space for a different kind of tenant.

The Retail Moves Behind the Restaurants

The restaurant additions get the attention, but the retail shuffle underneath them is what actually explains the pattern. Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma spent years in separate inline spaces inside the mall. In January 2026, both relocated into a new two-story building on the former Barnes & Noble outparcel, the same bookstore that had operated there for more than 30 years before closing in July 2024. That move freed up their old inline space inside the mall, which Christian Dior and Brunello Cucinelli are now splitting between them, with interior buildout for Dior beginning in May 2025 and Brunello Cucinelli's construction documents approved that July.

The same domino effect is happening with fine jewelry. Omega is relocating to a smaller, 1,848-square-foot unit near Santa Fe Café sometime in late 2026 or early 2027. Its current 2,519-square-foot space is becoming a new home for Van Cleef & Arpels.

A few smaller moves round out the fall calendar:

• Peter Millar is opening in the 2,517-square-foot space that used to be White House Black Market
• Piranesi fine jewelry opens across from Dior this fall, in a 781-square-foot unit last occupied by Gulf Coast International Properties
• Vuori activewear opens this fall next to Sephora
• Anthropologie is relocating within the mall into a larger storefront, also expected this fall

None of these are replacements in the literal sense. Each one is a smaller footprint holding a higher price point than what was there before, which is the same logic playing out at the Nordstrom site on a much bigger scale.

What's Still Behind Construction Walls

The two biggest pieces of this redevelopment are also the two that are furthest from finished. RH has not confirmed an opening date for its Naples gallery, though county permits were issued in August 2025 and the project has been described as targeting late 2026. Buck & Rider is targeting late 2026 as well, in the former Brio space on the mall's northern end.

Waterside first announced this wave of construction back in 2024, and by the time RH and Buck & Rider open, the property will have gone through roughly two years of demolition and rebuilding on three separate corners without ever fully closing to shoppers. That is a long runway for a mall that opened in November 1992, and it marks the most significant capital work the property has seen since the Forbes Company took over management in 2003.

What This Means If You Shop Here Regularly

If your rotation at Waterside has been the same for a few years, expect it to look different by the holidays. The bank branch corner now has a fine-dining seafood room with a wait list. The bookstore corner now has two home goods anchors under one roof. The department store corner is still fenced off, but it is becoming something closer to a small indoor-outdoor district than a single retailer. And the tenants leaving, Häagen-Dazs and L'Occitane among them, are leaving because their leases ended, not because Naples stopped shopping there.

None of this changes overnight, and the property has been careful to keep most of it open during construction. But three corners moving at once, on a timeline that closes out by early 2027, means the Waterside Shops you knew a year ago and the one you'll walk through by next winter are not quite the same property.

If you're weighing what a changing commercial corridor like this means for property values in North Naples, or you're simply trying to figure out where your next home search should start, Adam Papish can walk you through what's actually moving in this market. Find your next dream home with a conversation about what's changing in the neighborhoods you already know.