The Depot at Celina Station opened for leasing on February 6, 2026, the first piece of the 18-acre development at Preston Road and Ash Street to actually open its doors. The address came with a pool, a fitness center, a pet spa, and one and two bedroom units ready to move into. Everything about apartment living at Celina Station was finished and functioning from day one.
The commercial side of the property, the reason the whole project got pitched as a walkable link between the Preston Road corridor and the Historic Downtown Celina Square, was not. Anyone who signed a lease that February drove past storefronts with paper still taped over the glass.
Almost six months passed before the first retail tenant opened.
How the openings unfolded
Developer Allan Retail Group built Celina Station around eight multi-tenant buildings and what its leasing materials call a "local-first" lineup, meaning the retail mix was meant to favor specialty operators over national chains. The plan named a coffee shop, a swim school, a golf simulator studio, and a rooftop restaurant as the tenants that would fill in around the apartments. Every one of those was originally marketed to open in 2025.
None of them did. What actually happened ran on a different clock, and not in the order the renderings suggested.
My Swim Buddy was first. The swim school had spent nearly five years teaching lessons out of a residential site in Prosper before breaking ground on a new Celina facility in September 2025. By May 2026, Community Impact confirmed the school was open and teaching lessons at its new location, with an indoor pool, 14 teaching stations, and a viewing area for parents. That means swim lessons became available in Celina Station's orbit before coffee did.
1418 Coffee followed in July. The shop, formally Fourteen Eighteen Coffee, leased Suite 100 in Building 7 at the corner of Ash and Preston and opened July 28, 2026, according to Community Impact. The buildout ran about $500,000 and included a full commercial kitchen to support a partnership with Sugar Loaf Bakery for daily pastries and sandwiches. It's also the largest indoor seating area of any 1418 location, a detail that matters if the coffee run doubles as a place to sit and work. This was actually the town's second 1418 opening that summer. Ramble Coffee House, run by the same company, opened in June inside the Hillwood-built Ramble community on the north side of town. Two shops, one brand, opposite ends of Celina, five weeks apart.
So the sequence, in order: apartments in February, swim lessons by May, coffee by July. The two tenants that got the most attention in early marketing, the golf simulator and the rooftop restaurant, are the ones still waiting.
What's still waiting its turn
PRIISM Golf leased Suite 120, right next to 1418 Coffee, with plans for a 1,200 square foot golf simulator studio running GolfZone technology, the kind with moving swing plates and multi-surface hitting mats built to mimic real course conditions. Construction was originally slated to wrap in November. As of the most recent public reporting, no opening date had been confirmed.
The rooftop restaurant is further behind than that. Leasing materials describe a 3,000 square foot elevated bar and dining space designed to sit above the central park with a view of the downtown skyline, and the developer has called it Celina's first planned rooftop restaurant. No tenant has been named publicly yet.
For a visit, the staggered openings are only part of the picture; Celina Station's planned public spaces are also meant to connect the retail buildings and apartments.
The park that's supposed to tie it together
Across from the coffee shop, at the corner of Ash and Preston, leasing materials describe a half acre public park meant to give the district a shared outdoor space rather than just a strip of storefronts. That's consistent with how Allan Retail Group has talked about the project from the start: central green spaces and pedestrian paths connecting the eight buildings, built to function as a gathering spot rather than a standard retail center.
The apartments help explain why that design makes sense. The Depot's 700 units sit directly next to the retail buildings, giving Celina Station an audience that already lives there before a single tenant opens. That's a different starting point than most retail developments, which typically wait on rooftops to justify a lease. Here the rooftops came first, and the businesses are still catching up to them.
Celina Station's own pitch has always leaned on its location. It sits just a few minutes from the Historic Downtown Celina Square, close enough that a resident with an evening free has two directions to walk depending on what's actually open that week.
What this means if you're already driving this stretch of Preston
Right now, 1418 Coffee is open at Celina Station, and swim lessons are available at My Swim Buddy in Celina Station's orbit. The golf simulator and the rooftop restaurant are not open, at least not as of this writing, so planning an evening around either one means checking for a posted opening date first.
The gap between "leased" and "open" at Celina Station has run anywhere from a few months to well over a year, depending on the tenant. For a visit, check which businesses are open before you go.
If you're trying to figure out what a still-filling-in development like Celina Station actually means for daily life in Celina, or how it stacks up against the parts of town that finished filling in years ago, The DiBella Team keeps track of what's confirmed versus what's still a rendering, and is happy to walk through it with you.
