The old Harris Teeter at Seaside Farms is shedding its grocery-store past — and what’s emerging looks more like an architectural statement than a supermarket.
At a recent Mount Pleasant Commercial Design Review Board meeting, Decatur, Ga.-based Construction Resources unveiled plans to transform the shuttered 45,000-square-foot store into a CR Design Center, complete with sweeping glass walls, a reimagined façade, and a clean, showroom-style layout.
The board gave the design unanimous preliminary approval on Oct. 29.
“It couldn’t look nicer,” board member Elissa Morrison told the Post & Courier, summing up the general enthusiasm around the redesign.
From Groceries to Glass
The plans strip away nearly everything that screamed “supermarket.” Gone are the big signs and enclosed vestibule. Instead, the new vision leans on transparency — quite literally.
“We want to add as much transparency into that space as possible,” explained Andrew Allen, a landscape architecture analyst with Kimley-Horn, the firm behind the redesign. “Making that all glass and creating that porch gives you a more welcoming feel.”
The result aims to blur the line between indoors and out, with a recessed entrance and open-air porch meant to invite, not enclose.
Greening the Edges
Outside, the property will get a landscape refresh — native plants, pollinator-friendly species, and smaller trees to soften the building’s edge and create more usable greenspace. An existing fence will come down, and the site’s footprint will feel lighter, greener, and more connected to the neighboring Seaside Farms community.
“We’re protecting as much as we can,” Allen said, noting that most changes focus on the storefront to establish a cohesive brand for Construction Resources, rather than a wholesale rebuild.
A Shopping Center in Flux
The redesign marks another step in a year of transition for The Shoppes at Seaside Farms, which sits just off Rifle Range Road near the Isle of Palms Connector. The Harris Teeter closed in May after 12 years, and earlier this year the Yamato Japanese Steakhouse and Sushi Bar — another anchor tenant — also shut down.
A proposal to replace the Yamato site with a hotel was rejected by Town Council, leaving the shopping center at a crossroads between reinvention and restraint.
Looking Ahead
If all goes to plan, the new CR Design Center could become a showcase for Construction Resources’ upscale home products — a sleek, light-filled anchor at the heart of a shopping district still redefining itself.
For Seaside Farms, it’s less about what’s being lost and more about what’s being revealed: a fresh face, and maybe, a little more transparency — in every sense.
