Fairmount Shopping Center is getting a new anchor, and the story behind it says more about Mount Pleasant retail than the store itself does.
Anthropologie, the national women’s clothing brand known for its boho-leaning aesthetic, is opening its fifth South Carolina location, and second in the Lowcountry, at the Johnnie Dodds Boulevard shopping center. It’s taking over space formerly held by Play It Again Sports and Danco Modern Furniture. No opening date has been announced.
The bigger story is what’s happening around it. RCB Development bought Fairmount for $15 million in May 2025 and has been remaking the center since, in the process nearly tripling rent to fund updates and modernize what had become an aging retail strip. That’s pushed out longtime tenants, including Play It Again Sports and the restaurant Cuoco Pazzo, to make room for bigger national names.
“It’s always a balance,” Russell Canard, principal and managing partner of RCB, told the Post & Courier, describing the tension between retaining existing tenants and hitting the rents needed to fund the renovation.
Anthropologie landing here fits a pattern playing out across Mount Pleasant and the wider Charleston area: national retailers with real foot-traffic pull moving into centers that are getting repositioned upmarket, while smaller local operators either get priced out or relocate. It’s the same dynamic reshaping corridors from West Ashley to the peninsula, just with a different cast of tenants each time.
Whether that’s a net win depends on where you’re standing. Shoppers get a fresher, more polished center. The businesses that used to occupy that space get a much harder conversation about their lease. Fairmount is now the latest test case for which side of that trade Mount Pleasant comes down on.
This is a summary of an article published in the Post & Courier. Click here if you’d like to read that article.
