For years, the pitch on Bay Colony's location was simple: walk to the Ritz-Carlton, and Waterside Shops is right there too. That second half was always a stretch. Trieste, the high-rise closest to the Ritz-Carlton gate, lists Waterside Shops at four miles and a nine-minute drive on its own building materials. Bay Colony covers more than three square miles of gated coastline, preserve, and lake frontage, so "walking distance" depends entirely on which address you're standing at. What's actually true for most of the neighborhood is a five-to-ten-minute drive or an easy bike ride down Vanderbilt Beach Road. That distinction matters more this year than it has in a long time, because what's waiting at the other end of that short drive has changed more in the last twelve months than in the previous twenty.
The Old Waterside Quietly Fell Apart First
Before anything new could go in, three anchors came out, and not on anyone's schedule but their own. Nordstrom closed its Naples store in 2020, one of sixteen shuttered nationwide that year. Barnes & Noble pulled out in July 2024 as part of a broader retreat from mall formats. And Brio Tuscan Grille, which had occupied the same Waterside address for close to twenty years, filed for Chapter 11 in August 2025, its second bankruptcy in five years, before permanently closing its doors in April 2026.
None of the three were pushed out. Each left because the format it represented stopped working somewhere upstream of Naples. What's notable is what The Forbes Company, which has owned Waterside since 2005, chose to do with that much emptied square footage all at once. Instead of backfilling with more of the same, the response has been to bring in concepts that Naples residents previously had to leave the market to find.
What You Can Actually Walk Or Drive Into Tonight
Eddie V's Prime Seafood is open now. It launched June 7 as the first Southwest Florida location for the brand, in a freestanding building at 765 Seagate Drive that used to house a US Bank branch. The restaurant is run by managing partner Bob Bacastow, who came over with time at both The Capital Grille and an earlier Eddie V's posting in Princeton.
What's actually there: a 300-plus-label wine list recognized by Wine Spectator, hand-carved steaks finished tableside, and a cocktail program built around theater as much as flavor. The Smoked Old Fashioned arrives on a torched wooden plank with the smoke still trapped under glass. The Hope Diamond shifts from deep blue to magenta as it's poured. Live music runs nightly in the V Lounge starting at 6 or 6:30, depending on the night. Dinner service runs Sunday through Thursday from 4 to 9 p.m. and until 10 on weekends, with happy hour from 4 to 6:30 every day.
For context on where this sits in the market: Naples already had the Capital Grille, a Darden sibling brand that's held a North Naples address since 2008. Eddie V's is the same restaurant group's more contemporary, seafood-forward answer, with a livelier bar scene attached. Having both within a short drive of Bay Colony is new. As Bacastow put it when the restaurant opened, the goal was treating every guest like a guest of honor, from the cuisine to the live music in the lounge.
What's Still Under Construction
Two more concepts are on the way before the year is out, and neither one overlaps with what's already open.
- Buck & Rider is taking over the old Brio space and is targeting a late-2026 opening. This will be the seafood-driven brand's first location outside Arizona, following three restaurants at Camelback/Phoenix, North Scottsdale, and Gilbert/East Valley. The Naples build is being designed by the Michael Hsu Office of Architecture with Naples-based MHK Architecture handling local execution, and it will lean casual: open kitchen, a large raw bar, and indoor-outdoor seating built around fresh, flown-in seafood. Hi Noon Hospitality's CEO, Adam Strecker, has said he couldn't be more excited to start this next chapter in Naples and become part of the local community.
- The RH Restaurant is the most architecturally ambitious of the three. It sits at the center of RH Naples, a nearly 30,000-square-foot furniture and design gallery under construction on the old Nordstrom footprint. Six separate galleries connect through landscaped courtyards and glass-roofed walkways to a 4,143-square-foot restaurant and wine bar seating 174 people beneath a single elongated glass atrium. RH hasn't confirmed a firm date, but county permits went out in August 2025 and the projected timeline points to late 2026.
Between those two and Eddie V's, Waterside will go from having one significant sit-down seafood option and a bankrupt Italian chain, which is roughly where things stood at the start of 2025, to three full-service concepts that don't share a cuisine, a price point, or a room. That's a different kind of dining address than the one Bay Colony has had for most of the last decade.
The Retail Side Moved At The Same Time
The restaurant additions are the headline, but the shopping side of Waterside has been reshuffling on the same clock. Christian Dior opened a standalone flagship this year after relocating out of its former store-within-a-store space inside Saks Fifth Avenue. Brunello Cucinelli is taking the adjacent space in the same building, and Hermès is set to return to the property after a nine-year absence. Smaller moves are filling in around them: Peter Millar is opening in the old White House Black Market space, Piranesi fine jewelry is set for a fall opening across from Dior, and Van Cleef & Arpels is taking over Omega's current spot once Omega relocates nearby in late 2026 or early 2027. Anthropologie and the athletic brand Vuori are both slated for larger or new storefronts this fall. Through July and August, Waterside has been running a lemonade cart on Friday and Saturday afternoons, a small touch, but a sign of a property that's still treating its regular local traffic as the audience that matters even mid-construction.
Reported alongside the September 2025 groundbreaking, the total investment across these projects runs somewhere around $100 million, which multiple regional outlets have described as the largest capital commitment at the property since Forbes Company took it over roughly two decades ago. That's not a number that changes what's on your dinner table tonight, but it explains why the construction fencing has felt more permanent than a typical seasonal refresh. This is Waterside repositioning itself, not just re-tenanting a few empty boxes.
What This Actually Means If You Live Ten Minutes Away
The practical shift for anyone in Bay Colony is straightforward. For years, if you wanted the kind of high-energy seafood room with a serious wine program and live jazz that Eddie V's represents, or the specific raw-bar format Buck & Rider is known for in the Southwest, you were looking at a drive to Fort Lauderdale or Tampa, not a reservation down the road. That gap has closed, and it closed on a schedule you can now track by season instead of by rumor. Eddie V's is open. Buck & Rider and the RH Restaurant are both aiming for the back half of this year. Whether that means locking in a reservation before the winter crowds arrive or just knowing what's worth the drive once construction wraps, the short trip out of Bay Colony's gates is pointing somewhere new.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in the neighborhood, or you're simply curious what a Bay Colony property looks like in today's market, Janine Monfort has spent three decades tracking exactly this kind of shift on the ground in North Naples. Get Your Instant Home Valuation to see where your property stands.
