If you have lived in Pelican Bay for more than a season or two, you know the September rhythm. The valet line at Marker 36 thins, the tram schedule loosens, and the drive down Pelican Bay Boulevard toward Tamiami Trail North feels like a private road. That pattern is still intact this year. What is different is what will be waiting on the far end of that drive when the snowbirds return in November.
Between the Waterside Shops property line and the Clam Bay boardwalks, three of the community's daily anchors are being rebuilt on overlapping timelines. By the time the towers light back up, the walk from your building to dinner, to a gallery seat at Hayes Hall, or to the sand at North Beach will not feel the same as it did in April.
The Waterside Rooms Landing Before High Season
For most of the last decade, Waterside's sit-down dining conversation began and ended with a short list. That changes this fall. At the start of 2025, Waterside had one major sit-down seafood option and a casual Italian chain that had filed for bankruptcy. By the end of 2026, it will have Eddie V's, Buck & Rider, and the RH restaurant — three concepts with no overlap in price point, format, or menu identity. The closure most residents already noticed was Brio Italian Grille, which permanently closed in April at Waterside Shops, freeing a footprint the property has redirected toward destination tenants rather than another chain replacement.
Read as a set, the three rooms function less like restaurant openings and more like a repositioning of the whole property. Here is how they line up:
Room | Format | Seats | Opening Target |
|---|---|---|---|
Eddie V's Prime Seafood | Fine-dining seafood & prime steaks, live jazz, 300+ wines | 361 | Summer 2026 (open) |
Buck & Rider | Open kitchen, expansive raw bar, indoor-outdoor | — | Late 2026 |
RH Restaurant | Full-service dining under a glass atrium inside RH Naples | 174 | Late 2026 |
Eddie V's flies seafood in from pristine waters around the world alongside prime center-cut steaks, with a Wine Spectator-recognized list of more than 300 wines and a V Lounge featuring live music trios nightly. Darden confirmed the Naples location as its first in the region, and the Spring 2026 listing on Eddie V's own site now shows 765 Seagate Drive, Naples, FL 34103. The 361-seat count on that patio-anchored building is not incidental. The patio on the eastern end provides outdoor dining for the 361-seat restaurant, and Eddie V's in Naples is targeted to open in early 2026.
Buck & Rider is the more interesting bet for a resident because it is the concept nobody in the region has seen yet. Buck & Rider is the acclaimed seafood-driven concept from Scottsdale, Arizona, and the new location is slated to open in late 2026 in the prestigious Waterside Shops in Naples, Florida. The project is led by the acclaimed Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, with Naples-based MHK Architecture providing local expertise. Hi Noon Hospitality's CEO put the timing bluntly:
"Really, really pushing for November or fourth quarter of next year."
The third room is the one most residents will underestimate until they walk into it. The former Nordstrom building, 74,591 square feet and vacant since 2020, is now the construction site for RH Naples. Six separate galleries with skylights will connect 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 174-seat format beneath the glass atrium, with wine service threaded through the experience, is closer to the European model of a gallery restaurant than anything currently on the Waterside roster.
The practical shift for a household on Pelican Bay Boulevard: 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. Retail follows the same logic. By late 2026, Waterside will hold three new sit-down restaurants, a Christian Dior flagship, the return of Hermès after a nine-year absence, and a Brunello Cucinelli boutique.
What Artis-Naples Is Putting on Hayes Hall's Calendar
The cultural campus at the north end of the community is running its own repositioning in parallel. Themed "To Light: The Art of Hope," the season brings together wide-ranging, multidisciplinary programs, with Artistic and Music Director Alexander Shelley leading the Naples Philharmonic through all nine of Beethoven's symphonies in conjunction with the season-long commemoration of the composer 200 years after his death, plus major exhibitions in The Baker Museum and performances by Yo-Yo Ma, Audra McDonald, Itzhak Perlman, Sutton Foster and Kelli O'Hara.
For residents who like to lock in tickets before Thanksgiving, the dates worth putting on the fridge:
- Hamilton, November 24–25 and 27–29, 2026, in Hayes Hall
- Yo-Yo Ma, January 8, 2027
- Sutton Foster and Kelli O'Hara with the Naples Philharmonic, January 16 in Hayes Hall, an evening inspired by Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett's Carnegie Hall program
- Alfreda Sings — Disco Divas!, January 22 in the Daniels Pavilion
- Michael Feinstein, March 10 in Hayes Hall, "My Celebration: Johnny Mathis & Henry Mancini Magical Music"
- Another Evening with Itzhak Perlman, March 11 in Hayes Hall, a multimedia program marking his 80th birthday with pianist Rohan de Silva
- Death Becomes Her, December 29, 2026 through January 3, 2027, the Tony Award-winning musical based on the 1992 film with direction and choreography by Christopher Gattelli
The Baker Museum program is where the season quietly gets more ambitious. The Surrealist International: Fifty Years of Dreams explores the long trajectory of surrealism through paintings, photographs, sculptures and objects drawn from the collection of Tate, United Kingdom, including works by Eileen Agar, Jean Arp, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Dorothea Tanning, alongside less familiar figures such as Kati Horna, Malangatana Ngwenya, Osamu Shiihara and Lionel Wendt. Running in parallel: Baron Wolman: Capturing the Sound of an Era, from October 2026 through June 2027, celebrates the trailblazing first chief photographer of Rolling Stone magazine, whose lens immortalized Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, organized in collaboration with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
For a resident who already holds Broadway or Masterworks tickets, the useful move this month is subscription-exchange planning. Subscribers may exchange tickets for any performance for another performance during the season, starting with the subscriptions exchange week in September, with no exchange fees.
The Sand, the Mangroves, and the Trams
The beach you walk out onto this fall is not the beach you walked away from last spring. The Pelican Bay Beach renourishment was funded by the Pelican Bay Services Division since it is not a public beach, using trucks to haul beach-quality sand from Stewart Mining in Immokalee. Crews spread the sand across 2.9 miles of Vanderbilt Beach and Pelican Bay Beach from Florida Department of Environmental Protection reference monuments R-22+300 near the Bluebill Avenue beach access to R-37+000 about 1,000 feet south of the Pelican Bay North Pavilion. Total project cost across both beaches was approximately $7.5 million. The contractor's target for completion was January 15, 2026.
Behind the dune line, the more consequential work happened in the mangroves. The Clam Bay side of the story is arguably more interesting. With the double impact of Hurricanes Ian and Milton, Clam Bay and the mangroves took a beating. Inlet and dune restoration took place in late 2025, thanks to the Pelican Bay Services Division and Collier County Commissioner Dan Kowal.
The scale of what the Foundation is moving across that renourished sand is easy to forget until you look at the numbers. Foundation drivers complete more than 900,000 trips to the beach and back each year. The beach dining lineup that absorbs all those trips remains the same three-part structure residents already know: Marker 36 at North Beach offers an upscale coastal kitchen with indoor and outdoor seating and seasonal live music, Sandbar at South Beach serves a more casual, Mediterranean-leaning menu, and The Nest provides a smaller snack and drink stop with views. Summer hours are still in effect through the shoulder weeks, so it is worth confirming with the Foundation before you send a houseguest.
The Racquets Center Nobody Talks About Anymore
The other quiet infrastructure story sits a few minutes inland at 764 Vanderbilt Beach Road. The foundation invested $6 million in upgrades that include 20 Novacrylic pickleball courts, two new tennis courts, renovations to six sub-irrigated lighted Har-Tru clay tennis courts, a pro shop, shaded waiting area, sound mitigation wall, fencing and other park and parking enhancements. The public park was deeded to the county in 1994 by Pelican Bay developer WCI as part of an agreement to allow denser development in the 6,500-home luxury community, and the park had not been updated since.
The February grand opening drew a name most pickleball-watching residents recognized. Pelican Bay Foundation hosted a grand opening at Pelican Bay Community Park featuring pickleball demonstrations, professional exhibition matches and community activities, headlined by Ben Johns, widely regarded as one of the sport's top players with more than 150 PPA Tour titles and No. 1 singles and doubles rankings, who participated in a panel discussion and a special exhibition match. The foundation manages the tennis and pickleball courts, with 10 courts reserved for public play by non-Pelican Bay residents. In practical terms, the wait for a court on a Tuesday morning has changed shape. So has the number of neighbors who suddenly play.
The Read for Residents
Put the four threads together and the fall pattern in Pelican Bay is no longer a season that empties out. Waterside is going from one destination room to four in a single calendar year. The Baker Museum is opening a Tate-sourced surrealism show and a Rolling Stone-era photography retrospective on overlapping runs. The sand under North and South Beach is fresh. The racquet courts up the road are new. The community is being handed, in the space of six months, more indoor and outdoor programming density than it has absorbed in a decade.
That is the version of the neighborhood your snowbird neighbors will meet in November. If you are the household that stayed through the summer, the practical work is small and worth doing now: book the RH atrium the week it opens, run the Foundation website for updated Marker 36 winter hours, and pick two Hayes Hall dates before the subscription exchange window closes in September.
When you are ready to talk about how this fall's changes are reshaping value in specific Pelican Bay subdivisions, from the high-rise line on the boulevard to the single-family enclaves inland, Chad Phipps is here for a neighborhood-level conversation. Get your instant home valuation and local market consultation, and let's map what the next twelve months look like from your address.
