Walk the breezeway at Watersound Town Center this fall and you'll pass a construction fence advertising an in-store bridal fitting suite, then continue a few doors down and order an Old Fashioned served on top of a vintage baseball card, underneath a high school football scoreboard hauled in from Iowa. Both of those things are true right now, within a few hundred feet of each other. Neither makes much sense on its own. Together, they say something about how fast this stretch of Highway 98 has changed.
For years, the shorthand for Watersound Town Center was simple: a Publix, a Starbucks, somewhere to grab dinner on the way home. That description stopped being complete around the time Anthropologie signed a lease here and a well-known Alys Beach restaurant group decided this corner of Inlet Beach was worth a third concept. What's actually opening this year tells you more about how this pocket of 30A is filling in than any single storefront could.
The Home Count Caught Up to the Storefronts
In November 2025, St. Joe Company reported more than 1,500 completed homes, townhomes and apartment units across the surrounding Watersound Origins and Watersound Camp Creek communities, with more homesites in various stages of development. By the end of June 2026, that figure had climbed past 1,700. That's roughly 200 new households settling within walking or short golf-cart distance of the town center in about eight months, not counting the homesites still under construction.
That pace of household growth is the reason the retail space keeps expanding and keeps filling up anyway. Every time St. Joe has announced a new round of leases over the past year, the occupancy figure attached to the announcement has stayed the same: 98 percent leased.
| Reporting date | Retail, restaurant, service and office space | Occupancy |
|---|---|---|
| November 2025 | approximately 150,000 sq ft | 98% leased |
| June 2026 | approximately 160,000 sq ft | 98% leased |
| August 2026 | approximately 170,000 sq ft | 98% leased |
| Planned build-out | approximately 400,000 sq ft | — |
The center has added roughly 20,000 square feet of leasable space since last fall and hasn't loosened up. Construction is already underway on the next building, and St. Joe has said another one is expected to break ground before the year is out, which means the space is not catching up to demand so much as chasing it.
Why a Wedding Dress Shop Picked a Highway Retail Corridor
The clearest sign of how national retailers are reading this market is the Anthropologie lease itself. The company has committed to an approximately 9,000-square-foot store, and it will include an Anthropologie Weddings bridal shop, a concept the brand only places in a select number of locations nationwide. Rebecca Waters, St. Joe's Director of Commercial Sales and Leasing, pointed to the strength of the destination wedding business across the 30A trade area as the reason the format made sense here rather than somewhere with denser year-round foot traffic.
That's a specific bet, not a generic one. Anthropologie isn't opening a standard store and hoping weddings happen to walk in. It's building a dedicated bridal appointment space because enough weddings are already happening along this stretch of coast to justify the square footage. For anyone who has tried to book a Saturday evening reception venue on 30A in the past few wedding seasons, that reasoning will sound familiar rather than surprising.
The Alys Beach Team Set Up Five Minutes Down the Highway
The restaurant side of the story has a name and a backstory. Jeremy and Angela Walton, the husband-and-wife team behind Quest Hospitality Concepts, opened The Citizen in Alys Beach in 2021, then took over and reimagined Fonville Press as a market, café and coffee shop in the same town. Both are established enough that a third concept from the same team was treated as local news rather than just another opening.
That third concept, Scout Sports Tavern, opened August 27, 2025, at 50 Origins Main Street, Suite 100, inside Watersound Origins. The kitchen is run by Executive Chef Todd Hogan, and the cocktail program was built in collaboration with Christine Tarpey of Better Together Beverage and Quest's beverage director Tyler Faust. The result includes drinks like the Three Pointer, a nod to basketball built on three ingredients, the Wimby Cup, a twist on Wimbledon's signature drink, and The Catcher and the Rye, an Old Fashioned served on a vintage baseball card. The room itself is stocked with hand-sourced memorabilia, including a fully restored antique pinball machine guests can play and charge to their tab, and that scoreboard, pulled from a high school in Iowa, that anchors the game room.
What matters for anyone who already lives here isn't the drink menu. It's that a restaurant group with a track record in Alys Beach chose to expand into Watersound rather than a third location somewhere better established. That's a different kind of vote than a national apparel brand signing a lease off a spreadsheet. It's operators who already know this coastline deciding the audience here has grown large enough to support what they built.
What's Actually Open This Week
For residents deciding where to run errands, grab dinner or work out this week, here's what's operating right now at Watersound Town Center:
Eat: Scout Sports Tavern, Ambrosia Prime Seafood and Steaks, Jersey Mike's Subs
Shop: FP Movement, Hemline, Monkee's, Sunset Shoes & Lifestyles, J.McLaughlin, Summer House Lifestyle, Art-of-Fact(s)
Move: Lagree 30A
Handle life: Publix Super Market, Starbucks, Fischer Homes' office and showroom, 30A Chiropractic and Wellness, Watersound Executive Suites
Johnnie-O, the golf-inspired apparel brand, opened its doors within the past few weeks as well, joining the retail lineup after months of anticipation.
What's Still Under Construction
Construction has already begun on the new building that will eventually house Anthropologie, though the company hasn't announced an exact opening date. St. Joe has said another building is anticipated to break ground later this year, part of the path toward that 400,000-square-foot build-out. Given that every previous phase has opened at or near full occupancy, it's a reasonable bet that whatever fills those buildings will be spoken for well before the doors do.
None of this changes what Watersound has always been good at: a place to pick up groceries, meet a friend for dinner, or get a coffee before the beach. It just means there's more reason to make a stop there than there used to be, and more evidence that the people building it think the neighborhood around it isn't finished growing.
If you're weighing what a fast-growing corner of the Emerald Coast like this means for your own plans, Beach Escapes Coastal Living has spent years watching how these communities develop up close. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what a place like Watersound actually offers, beyond what's on the storefront signs.
