If you have lived in The Moorings for a while, you have a mental map of the perimeter. Lowdermilk to the south for a morning walk, Venetian Village across the bridge for a bay-side dinner, Waterside Shops five minutes north for anything Saks does not carry, and the old Executive Club site sitting quietly on Gulf Shore Boulevard where nothing seemed to change for years. That map is being rewritten this year, and most of it inside a single twelve-month window.
The thesis for this summer is small but real. The lifestyle amenities that used to justify keeping a car in the driveway are consolidating into a tighter ring around the neighborhood. A resident who used to drive to Fort Lauderdale or Tampa for a specific restaurant, or to Bal Harbour for a specific boutique, will now find those brands inside a five-minute radius by fall.
Waterside Is Not Being Refreshed. It Is Being Rebuilt.
The scale of what is happening at 5415 Tamiami Trail N is easy to underestimate if you only see the finished storefronts as they open. A cleaner read comes from the construction permits.
- Dior stepped out of its store-within-a-store at Saks on June 11 and opened a standalone 6,000-square-foot boutique, the first of six new stores announced for the property this summer.
- Peter Millar is taking the former White House Black Market space.
- Vuori, the California athletic label, is expected this fall.
- Anthropologie is relocating within the property into a larger storefront, also targeted for fall.
- Hermès has returned to Waterside after a nine-year absence, in a freestanding pavilion.
- Brunello Cucinelli is building out roughly 4,000 square feet of the former Williams-Sonoma space, next door to the new Dior flagship.
Two food-and-beverage anchors sit behind those retail moves. Eddie V's is targeted for a summer 2026 opening at 765 Seagate Drive, its first location in the region and the reason a specific type of Moorings resident has historically driven three hours for a steak and a wine list. The larger project is the RH Naples campus on the former Nordstrom footprint, a one-story, 29,382-square-foot building with six skylit galleries connected by landscaped courtyards to a central restaurant and wine bar beneath a glass atrium, projected to open near the end of this year.
Set that against a baseline. 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 the same property will hold Eddie V's, the RH restaurant, and a third concept, none of which overlaps in price point, room, or menu identity. That is a structural change in what "dinner at Waterside" means for someone who eats there twice a month.
If you want a small, tangible marker of how the property is treating the summer construction phase, The Squeeze runs Fridays and Saturdays in July and August with complimentary lemonade for guests walking the center while the buildouts continue.
A $699,787 Playground Vote At Lowdermilk
On June 15, Naples City Council was scheduled to vote on a $699,787 agreement with Playmore West Inc. to install a new playground and a covered gazebo at Lowdermilk Park, replacing the north-side playground that Hurricane Ian destroyed in September 2022.
Funding pulls from two previously approved park enhancement projects and a $250,000 donation from the Nommensen family, with an additional $250,000 to come from the Beach Fund via a 2025–26 budget update.
Two details matter for a Moorings resident who uses Lowdermilk as a daily walking beach. The gazebo was originally scoped into a 2025 improvement package but was pulled when construction bids came in above budget, which is why the covered structure has been absent for two summers running. And the north side of the park has been operating without a playground for nearly four years, a gap most Naples-side visitors have quietly worked around. Both of those absences are on a defined path to closure. Coverage of the council action is here on WINK.
Venetian Village In Off-Season Mode
Across the Doctors Pass bridge, the summer rhythm at The Village Shops on Venetian Bay is looser than it looks from Gulf Shore Boulevard. The waterfront restaurants are running summer hours and daily happy hours through the slow months, which is when the Village is at its best if you live within a mile of it.
| Restaurant | Summer schedule cue |
|---|---|
| MiraMare Ristorante | Nightly live music 6 to 9 p.m., chef's table pricing through the summer |
| Fish Restaurant | Same building group, summer specials and daily happy hour |
| M Waterfront Grille | Upper Deck Bar lighter menu, 2 to 4:30 p.m. |
The reason to know this as a resident rather than a visitor is straightforward. Weeknight tables that require a two-week reservation in February open up on the same afternoon in July. If you have out-of-town family arriving in August and you want a bay-side dinner without the seasonal wait, the Village is quietly the easiest booking in the city right now.
The 3300 Gulf Shore Site Is No Longer Sitting Idle
The former Executive Club parcel at 3300 Gulf Shore Boulevard, between the Gulf and Doctors Bay, broke ground on January 29. The project is 3300 Gulf Shore, an eight-story development from Florida-based Kolter Urban with 51 condominiums and a private 16-slip marina.
The practical read for the neighborhood is not the finished building. It is the next twenty-four months. Construction traffic, staging, and delivery routing on Gulf Shore Boulevard will run through the height of season more than once. Residents on the surrounding blocks who track morning bike routes and afternoon beach walks will want to build the site into their planning the way they already build in the Doctors Pass drawbridge schedule.
There is a secondary read that matters if you have owned in The Moorings for a decade or more. The Executive Club site had been effectively dormant since well before Hurricane Ian. A groundbreaking on a fifty-one-unit waterfront project on that specific parcel is the clearest signal in years that the bayfront's remaining tear-down sites are moving into active redevelopment rather than open-ended holding patterns.
What This Actually Changes For A Current Resident
The updates above are not a roundup. They are four points on a single line.
- The perimeter is compressing. Storefronts and restaurants that required a drive up to Mercato or a trip to another market are landing within a five-minute radius of The Moorings by the end of this year.
- The public amenities that anchor a Moorings morning are being restored on a defined timeline, not deferred again.
- Summer is the operational window for that work, which means the trade-off this season is a quieter beach and easier restaurant bookings against occasional construction noise and lane management.
- The bayfront redevelopment pipeline is no longer theoretical. The Executive Club site is under active construction, and that changes the frame for the remaining older parcels along Gulf Shore.
None of this changes what makes the neighborhood work. The canals still run the way they ran in 1963 when the par-63 course opened. The Moorings Private Beach Park is unchanged. Harbour Drive at 6 a.m. still belongs to walkers and dogs. What is changing is the ring around it, and the ring matters more than most residents give it credit for.
Let's Connect
If you own in The Moorings and you are curious how the perimeter changes at Waterside, Lowdermilk, and 3300 Gulf Shore are being read by buyers and appraisers, that is a conversation worth having before the fall openings land. Reach out to Nick Solimene for a direct, neighborhood-level read on what any of it means for your address.
