What's Open at Coastal Centre Conway Right Now?

Drive down Church Street past 16th Avenue this week and you will see six storefronts lit up, parking lots full, carts rolling. HomeGoods. Marshalls. PetSmart. Burlington. Ulta Beauty. Five Below. All six have been ringing up sales since spring. Keep driving past those same storefronts and you will also see fencing, bare concrete pads, and a Walmart Neighborhood Market that broke ground on August 13. The restaurants people in Conway have been talking about since last fall, the newspaper-themed sandwich shop and the steak-and-pasta spot with the patio, are still weeks or months out.

That gap is not about which businesses locals want more. It is about what it actually takes to open a store that sells folded towels versus a restaurant that has to pass a health inspection with a working grease trap. Coastal Centre, the redeveloped mall at the corner of Church Street and 16th Avenue, is not opening as one event. It is opening in two distinct waves, and the order those waves arrived in tells you something real about how a project like this gets built.

What You Can Actually Walk Into Right Now

The retail wave landed first, and it landed as a group. Rise Partners, the Chattanooga-based firm that bought the largely vacant mall for $14 million in October 2024, delivered roughly 112,000 square feet of new tenant space between February and April of this year. HomeGoods, Marshalls, PetSmart, Burlington, Ulta Beauty, and Five Below all opened for business by the time Rise held its grand opening ceremony in May, with Mayor Barbara Jo Blain telling the crowd the old mall was no longer an eyesore.

That is the part of the story that has already happened. It is also the part that gets the least attention now, because six months later it just looks like a normal shopping center. What is still unfolding is the food and grocery side, and that side runs on a slower clock.

The Status Board, As of This Week

Here is where every named tenant actually stands as of mid-September 2026, based on the most recent public filings and reporting:

Two things stand out on that list. First, every retailer that is open today sells goods off a shelf. Second, every business still waiting on a build-out involves a kitchen, a grocery cooler system, or a bank vault. That is not a coincidence.

Why the Sandwich Shop Is Ahead of the Grocery Store

A national retailer like Burlington or Five Below moves into a shell that mostly needs flooring, shelving, lighting, and a point-of-sale system. The permitting is largely about occupancy and fire code. A grocery store or a restaurant needs all of that plus plumbing rated for commercial kitchens, grease interceptors, ventilation hoods, and a health department sign-off before a single customer walks in. That difference in build-out complexity is a big part of why Conway got six retailers before it got a single new restaurant, even though the restaurant announcements came around the same time as the store announcements.

Presswell's is a useful case study in just how long that runway is. Owner Warren de Villiers signed on for the space in what once was a Kmart garden center, and by his own account the timeline ran through distinct phases: design work with a Grand Strand interior firm, a general manager brought on in early August, and the rest of the staff hired and trained during the third week of September, all ahead of a mid-to-late September opening. De Villiers has said Conway is exploding at the moment and that the town is starving for some good food, which is exactly the kind of local read that explains why an operator would bet on a 1,750-square-foot space with no digital menu boards and a fully in-house bread program, choices that take longer to execute than flipping on the lights in a big box store.

J Peters follows the same logic on a bigger scale. Owner Jon Angell has run his original location in Anderson for over a decade and knows the difference between leasing a finished retail box and converting a former garden center into a full-service restaurant with a bar and a patio. His timeline points to the end of 2026, roughly eight months behind the retail wave and running alongside the Chipotle now under construction in front of Belk, which still has no announced opening date.

It Is Not Just the Mall

The retail-first, food-second pattern is not confined to the 501 corridor. A Slim Chickens and a Firehouse Subs are under construction together near Conway High School, a separate project from Coastal Centre but running on a similar build-out clock. On Main Street, Liberty Brew Coffee, the veteran-owned shop known for its original location on Highway 90, has been working toward a second Conway location with a drive-thru and outdoor seating. Founder David Steadman has talked about wanting the new spot to carry the same red, white, and blue identity as the original, which again points to a build-out that takes longer than stocking a shelf, even for a coffee shop.

What ties all of these together is Conway's population growth. The city grew from roughly 17,000 residents in 2010 to nearly 28,000 by 2023, and city officials have pointed to that growth as the reason national retailers finally showed up. Councilman William Goldfinch put it plainly when he said the mall redevelopment means people can get what they need without adding to the traffic on 501 heading toward Myrtle Beach. The food side of that equation is simply running a few steps behind the retail side, not because demand is weaker, but because kitchens take longer to build than sales floors.

What This Looks Like Over the Next Few Months

If you already live in Conway, the practical takeaway is straightforward. The retail side of Coastal Centre is done and functioning today. If you need a gift, a dog bed, or a discount coat, that errand is already easier than it was a year ago. The food side is worth watching in stages rather than waiting for one grand reopening. Presswell's should be the next thing to actually open, likely within the next couple of weeks based on de Villiers' own timeline. The Walmart Neighborhood Market is a longer wait, since it only broke ground in August. J Peters and Chipotle are both under construction now, so late 2026 is a reasonable window for either. Parker's Kitchen, Wingstop, Nothing Bundt Cakes, and Chase Bank remain on the site plan without a construction timeline, which is its own kind of information: a signed lease with no groundbreaking usually means the permitting is still in progress behind the scenes.

None of this is really about one shopping center. It is about a fast-growing part of Horry County catching up to its own population, one build-out phase at a time. The stores came first because they could. The restaurants are worth the wait, and Conway will know exactly when each one is ready, because the timelines have been public every step of the way.

If you are watching this corner of Conway change and wondering what it means for the neighborhoods around it, from Cottage Lane to the Church Street corridor, Natalie Rakoci has been tracking this market long enough to put growth like this in context. Let's Connect if you want to talk about what a changing commercial corridor means for the area you call home.