The biggest empty box in Mount Pleasant is about to get two tenants, and neither one has ever opened a store in South Carolina.
Preliminary plans filed with the town's Design Review Board on Aug. 12 call for splitting the former Bed Bath & Beyond at Mount Pleasant Towne Centre between Crate & Barrel and L.L. Bean. Local engineering firm Seamon Whiteside submitted the application for 1744 Towne Center Way.
That space has been dark since early 2023.
The split. L.L. Bean takes 15,483 square feet on the left side facing the building, keeping the old Bed Bath & Beyond entrance with an upgraded doorway. Crate & Barrel gets the remaining 18,830 square feet and a new entrance of its own. The front of the building gets demolished and redesigned, with a new canopy line and added landscaping. The live oaks next to the building stay, fenced off during construction. The parking lot does not change.
Why it matters. Both are genuine South Carolina debuts. The nearest L.L. Bean stores are in Alabama, Florida and Virginia. Crate & Barrel's closest locations are Atlanta and Charlotte. If you have been driving to one of those, you can stop.
It also solves a problem that has been quietly eating at Towne Centre for three years. Continental Realty bought the 51-acre property in 2020 for $147 million and has struggled to fill the big-box space ever since. The firm floated a rezoning that would have added housing, offices and greenspace, with a contingency plan in case Belk and the Regal Cinema declined to renew their leases down the line. The town's Planning Committee never found the plans concrete enough, and the whole thing was scrapped in August 2025 when time ran out.
Two national anchors solve it the old-fashioned way.
A representative for Continental Realty declined to comment.
The bigger picture. This is not happening in isolation. Anthropologie, owned by Urban Outfitters, is preparing to open at the Fairmount Shopping Center on Johnnie Dodds Boulevard. East Cooper retail is pulling a class of tenant it did not have five years ago.
Worth keeping straight: these are preliminary plans, not an opening date. A Design Review Board application is the first visible step, not the last. Nobody has said when the doors open.
Still, when two brands that have never bothered with this state both pick the same building on the same filing, that tells you something about who they think is moving here.
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