Five days ago, the St. Joe Company confirmed the retailer that's had residents guessing for months: Anthropologie is opening a store at Watersound Town Center, and it's not a small one. The lease covers roughly 9,000 square feet, and the location will include an in-store Anthropologie Weddings bridal experience, a format the brand has placed in only a select number of stores nationwide.
That single lease tells you more about where this town center is headed than any list of new restaurants could. For three years, Watersound Town Center has functioned mostly as a convenience errand loop for the people who live behind it: Publix for groceries, Fleet Feet for running shoes, Grand Nails Lounge for a manicure between school pickups. A national bridal concept is a different kind of tenant. It's not there because residents needed one more place to buy a dress. It's there because the center has crossed some threshold that makes it worth a brand's while to plant a flag that pulls shoppers from well outside a five-minute walk.
The Square Footage Tells the Real Story
Watch the numbers over the last two years and the shift stops being a hunch and starts being a pattern.
| Timeframe | Retail, dining, and office space | Leasing status | Nearby homes completed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-2024 | About 138,000 sq ft, with 16,000 more under construction | Growing tenant mix | Not reported |
| November 2025 | About 150,000 sq ft | Strong demand cited by St. Joe | 1,500+ across Watersound Origins and Watersound Camp Creek |
| June 2026 | About 160,000 sq ft | 98% leased | 1,700+ across Watersound Origins, Watersound Camp Creek, and Watersound Origins Crossings |
| Planned | 400,000 sq ft total | Two more buildings breaking ground this year | Ongoing |
Ninety-eight percent leased sounds like a center that's basically full. It isn't behaving like one. St. Joe has two additional buildings slated to break ground before the end of 2026, on top of the space that just opened. A landlord doesn't keep building when demand has caught up with supply. It builds when the waiting list is longer than the building.
William Brock, St. Joe's Vice President of Commercial Real Estate, described the pace this way when the company announced the June 2026 round of leases:
"We're excited to welcome retailers of this stature and celebrate what their openings represent for the future of Watersound Town Center."
That's corporate phrasing for a specific idea. This isn't a landlord scrambling to fill vacancies. It's a landlord choosing which national brands get the next available storefront, with two more buildings already queued up to hold whichever names come after Anthropologie.
What Actually Opened While You Were Busy Living Here
The tenant roster has moved fast enough this year that it's worth a plain list, because half of these landed with little fanfare between spring and late summer:
- FP Movement, the activewear line from Free People
- Hemline, a Southeast women's clothing boutique with more than 30 locations regionally
- Monkee's, an upscale women's boutique with roughly 60 stores across the Southeast
- Sunset Shoes & Lifestyles, a Northwest Florida shoe and fashion chain with six area locations
- Johnnie-O, the golf-inspired apparel brand distributed through nearly 2,000 golf shops nationally
- Jersey Mike's Subs
- Lagree 30A, a Megaformer fitness studio running 45-minute low-impact, high-intensity classes
- Art-of-Fact(s), a home décor and gift shop from the owners of The Art of Simple in Santa Rosa Beach
- A Fischer Homes office and design showroom, the national builder active in Watersound Origins and nearby Breakfast Point East
None of that reads like a neighborhood strip center anymore. It reads like a regional shopping district that happens to sit at the front door of a residential community. J.McLaughlin, Summer House Lifestyle, and Ambrosia Prime Seafood and Steaks were already anchoring the mix before this run, so the newcomers aren't filling empty storefronts. They're upgrading a center that was already working.
The Free Nights Are Almost Over
Set the retail news aside for a second, because the other thing worth knowing right now has a much shorter shelf life.
Every Tuesday and Sunday this summer, the Pavilion at Watersound Town Center has hosted the Sounds Like Summer series, and it's been genuinely free. Tuesdays brought family-friendly theater from The Seaside REP, including an interactive run of Beauty and the Beast. Sundays leaned into music, with acts like J & The Causeways playing as part of the 30A Songwriters Summer Series, plus the occasional outdoor movie night under the Pavilion's ceiling fans. The series is booked for June, July, and August 2026, which means it's wrapping up for the year right around now.
What follows isn't nothing, but it's a different kind of event entirely. Discover Watersound Weekend takes over October 2 through 4, and its own materials describe it as open to people at every stage of the home-search process, whether that's a primary residence, a vacation home, an investment property, or a Watersound Club membership. It includes community tours through Watersound Origins, Watersound Camp Creek, Latitude Margaritaville Watersound, and Watersound Fountains, the Minto Matchpoint Pickleball Tournament, and a beachfront bonfire at the private Watersound Beach Club. Advance registration is required. After that comes PorchFest on October 11, where front porches around Watersound Origins turn into small stages, and RunWatersound on October 24, a 5k and 10k through the neighborhood's own streets.
The pattern is the same one showing up in the retail numbers. The free, unstructured, resident-first version of Watersound Town Center is giving way to programming built for a wider audience, curated tours, registration links, sales center hours. None of that makes the fall calendar worse. It just means the loose, walk-up-with-a-lawn-chair version of summer at the Pavilion is closing out for the year, right as a very different kind of gathering takes its place.
Before It Gets Busy, Get on the Water
If there's one part of daily life here that isn't shifting toward destination status, it's Lake Powell. The dock access that comes with a Watersound Origins membership still opens onto one of the largest coastal dune lakes in the country, and Camp Helen State Park maintains a public kayak launch on the North Trail for anyone who wants to paddle it without a boat. The Florida State Parks service notes paddlers can expect to see heron, egret, osprey, and the occasional dolphin along the way, plus white-tailed deer on the shoreline. It's a five-minute drive and a completely different kind of quiet than anything happening at the town center right now.
That contrast is worth sitting with. The commercial core of this community is visibly becoming something bigger than it was built to be, while the lake two miles south hasn't changed at all. Both are part of what it means to live here this particular August. One of them won't look the same by Thanksgiving.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this is a reason to worry about parking at Publix, though it might take an extra minute once Anthropologie opens its doors. It's a reason to notice that the version of Watersound Town Center you've gotten used to over the past couple of years, easy in-and-out errands, a burger at Friends 30A Burger Bar, a free Tuesday night with the kids, is in the middle of becoming something with more pull and more polish. The bridal shop, the two buildings still to break ground, the shift from a weekly free concert to a registration-only fall weekend: these are all the same signal arriving from different directions.
If you're watching this evolution and wondering what it means for the value of the home you're already sitting in, that's a fair question, and not one a press release will answer. I track these shifts across every Watersound and 30A neighborhood I work in, and I'm happy to walk through what a changing town center tends to do to nearby home values over time. If you want a clearer read on where your property stands today, Jamie Yarbrough can put together a current home valuation and talk through what the next few years of Watersound Town Center growth might mean for you.
