The Corner Outside The Grey Oaks Gates Just Finished Filling In

Turn out of Grey Oaks onto Airport-Pulling Road and for the better part of two years you'd have passed construction fencing, then bare pad sites, then a building shell with no signage. That corner, where Airport-Pulling meets Golden Gate Parkway, has been under some form of construction since 2024. As of this summer, it isn't anymore.

The last piece of Poinciana Plaza is finished, and the businesses that filled it in, and the order they filled it in, tell you something about what people who live behind these gates actually reach for on a Tuesday. It isn't a restaurant. It's a workout, a coffee, and a smoothie, in that order. The restaurant is still being decided.

What Actually Finished At The Corner

Halstatt, the Naples-based investment firm behind the development, announced completion of the retail piece at Poinciana Plaza in early June. The company's announcement described it as the final phase of a professional park that had already grown to 115,000 square feet of office space, with the new 10,000-square-foot retail strip anchored by a standalone Starbucks drive-thru. Katie Sproul, Halstatt's CEO, framed the coffee shop as the tenant that set the tone for everything after it: "Securing Starbucks early on was an important step in setting the tone for the type of tenants we wanted to attract."

That framing matters more than it sounds. A drive-thru coffee shop is not usually the headline of a retail announcement. Here it was the first domino, and everything that followed it leaned toward wellness rather than dining.

The Fill Order, Not Just The Names

Here's what has opened, or is scheduled to, as of the most recent reporting this summer:

Notice what's missing from the top of that list. No steakhouse. No wine bar. No sit-down concept trying to be the corner's signature address. Gulfshore Business reported in March that Discover Strength was first to open, in an 1,820-square-foot unit, and that Jenna Rambaud, Halstatt's director of marketing and public relations, confirmed executed leases for LVL Fitness and The Retreat Aesthetics before the plaza had a single restaurant signed.

The dining space wasn't neglected. It was held back on purpose. Rambaud told Gulfshore Business the team was "still in lease negotiations with one additional tenant, and then are targeting one or two restaurants to fill the remaining three bays," with the larger space reserved at the end of the strip farthest from the Starbucks building. That's a deliberate sequencing decision, not a stalled one. A developer with a fully leased office park behind it and a captive residential base beside it doesn't need to fill a restaurant bay with the first taker. It can wait for the right one.

Why This Corner Isn't Competing With The Clubhouse

Grey Oaks residents already have somewhere to eat well. The club has its own dining program and its own social calendar, and members don't need a strip mall to replace an evening out. What they've been missing is the fifteen-minute errand: the protein shake after a workout, the coffee before golf, the med-spa appointment squeezed between a tee time and a dinner reservation. That's the gap this corner is built to fill, and the tenant list reads like it was assembled with that specific gap in mind rather than as a generic suburban retail mix.

The Fresh Monkee franchisee put it plainly when asked why he wanted in. Brian Wasko, a Bonita Springs resident who opened his first Southwest Florida store at Coconut Point mall in Estero this April, told Naples Press he was drawn to the site's convenience as much as its visibility: "It's easy to get in and out of that plaza and I think with Starbucks it's going to generate a lot of traffic." That's a smoothie shop owner talking about drive-through ease, not destination dining. It confirms the corner is being built for a quick stop, not a night out.

Moorings Park at Grey Oaks, the senior living community that also sits at this intersection, describes its own location as being at the corner of Airport-Pulling and Golden Gate Parkway, in the middle of the same daily orbit. The corridor was never short on people. It was short on places for those people to run a fifteen-minute errand without getting back in the car and driving toward Mercato or downtown.

The Long Runway Behind A Fast Finish

What's easy to miss, standing at the finished corner today, is how long it took to get there. Halstatt first announced the retail addition to what it called a fully-leased, 102,000-square-foot professional park in September 2024. Ground broke roughly six months later, in March 2025, at 2160 Airport-Pulling Road, with the company's own release at the time anticipating tenants by the first quarter of 2026. Certificate of occupancy approvals for both buildings came through on March 10, 2026, roughly a year after groundbreaking. Discover Strength opened April 6. Halstatt announced the retail center as complete on June 2, 2026, with Starbucks still described as "opening this summer" in that release.

Call it about fifteen months from groundbreaking to the completion announcement, and nearly two years from the original 2024 plan, on one of the busiest intersections in central Naples, with an office park next door that never had a vacancy problem to solve. If a corner with that much built-in demand still took the better part of two years to deliver ten thousand square feet of retail, it's a useful data point for anyone watching construction timelines anywhere else in Naples. Demand doesn't compress a build schedule. Permitting, certificates of occupancy, and tenant lease negotiations move at their own pace regardless of how many cars pass the site each day.

What's Left, And When You'll Know

As of Halstatt's June 2, 2026 completion announcement, the restaurant question at Poinciana Plaza remained open, with a limited number of spaces still available and targeted specifically to restaurant and food-and-beverage concepts, including some with outdoor dining. The plan reported earlier in the spring was for one large restaurant or two medium ones in the final bays, positioned at the far end of the strip from the coffee shop. No name has been made public. When it lands, it will likely say something about who Halstatt believes actually stops at this corner on a weeknight, versus who stops on the way to or from the club.

Until then, the corner tells a smaller and more honest story than a big restaurant reveal would. It says that between the gate and Golden Gate Parkway, the businesses that got built first were the ones that fit into a morning already in progress. A strength session before the heat sets in. A coffee on the way to the first tee. A smoothie after either one. The dinner decision can wait. It usually does.

If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like around one of Naples' most private addresses, from the corner outside the gate to what's happening behind it, The Norgart Team tracks both. Become a VIP — Request Private Access.