The August Intersection: What Preston Road Finally Delivers to East Celina This Summer

For a decade, the running joke along Preston Road has been that Celina's rooftops arrived before its errands did. You bought the house in Light Farms or Cambridge Crossing or Twelve Oaks, and then you drove to Frisco for the warehouse run, Little Elm for the lumber, McKinney for the sporting goods. This August, two dates on the same intersection quietly close that chapter.

Two anchors, one corner, one month

The corner of Preston Road and Ownsby Parkway is doing something unusual this summer: it is opening two big-box anchors within five days of each other.

Costco's Celina warehouse is targeting a grand opening on August 26, 2026, at the southwest corner of Preston and Ownsby, inside the 40-acre Village at Ownsby Farms retail district that serves as the western bookend to South Celina's major commercial node. The store carries a full-service pharmacy, optical center, hearing aid clinic, and a 15,000-square-foot 10-stack fuel station.

Across the intersection, Home Depot is on a contractually enforced clock. Under a Celina City Council agreement, the 105,000-square-foot store must obtain its certificate of occupancy by July 31, 2026 and be operating by August 31, 2026, on the northwest corner of Ownsby Parkway and Preston Road adjacent to the Costco.

Read those two dates together. If both anchors hold their schedules, the trip you took last August to buy mulch and a rotisserie chicken in two different cities collapses into one traffic light in East Celina.

The spring that set the table

The August openings are not landing on empty ground. The corridor has been filling in quietly since spring.

• Torchy's Tacos at 3505 S. Preston Road, Ste. 120, sits inside The Crossing at Moore Farms. It is the northernmost Torchy's location the chain operates.
• Panda Express opened its first Celina store in late May or early June of this year.
• Texas Health Breeze Urgent Care celebrated its grand opening April 8, offering medical services for issues from allergies to broken bones.
• Farther north on Preston at the Frontier Parkway intersection, The Creeks at Celina has begun leasing up its dining side. Positioned as the primary daily-needs hub for Light Farms and Sutton Fields communities a half-mile east of the new H-E-B, it now anchors around Haraz Coffee House and Capo's Pizza & Pasta.

The through-line is that Preston Road is no longer a single-purpose commute artery. It is turning into a corridor where a Wednesday grocery run, a burrito, a doctor visit, and a coffee are all one stop.

Why the corner works: two developments, one intersection

The names on the site plans matter, because they signal what the intersection will feel like six months from now.

The Village at Ownsby Farms on the southwest corner is the destination-retail bookend, with Costco as the volume driver. The Crossing at Moore Farm on the northeast side is the home-improvement and everyday-services bookend. The Village at Ownsby Farms is a 40-acre destination retail district that serves as the western bookend to South Celina's major commercial node, while the eastern side, The Crossing at Moore Farm, focuses on home improvement and fitness.

That split is deliberate. You do not want two Costcos on the same corner. You want a bulk grocery anchor across the street from a hardware anchor across the street from smaller pads that pick up the impulse trips. The intersection is being engineered to keep residents on it for forty minutes at a time instead of five.

For a sense of the scale that is landing: 158,000 square feet is roughly the footprint of three standard grocery stores side by side, and a typical Costco carries everything from bulk groceries and pharmacy services to optical departments, tire centers, and seasonal merchandise that shifts with the calendar.

The trip you stop taking

Here is what the August lineup actually changes for a household that already lives off Preston. Not a shopping list. A commute list.

Academy Sports + Outdoors is worth a specific note. The Celina store will run nearly 64,000 square feet at 3525 S. Preston Road, which puts a full-line outdoor and sporting goods store inside a five-minute drive of every East Celina community from Carter Ranch south to Preston Hills. If you have coached a Prosper ISD or Celina ISD youth team in the last three years, you know what that Saturday morning drive looks like today. It is about to look different.

Blaze Pizza slots into The Crossing at Moore Farms at 3515 S. Preston Road, Ste. 130. It is the kind of pad-tenant that turns a big-box parking lot into a Friday-night place instead of just a Sunday-afternoon place.

The small stuff that changes weekday life

Anchors get the headlines. But the retail node also picks up several tenants that matter more for weekday routines than for weekend photo ops.

At the north end of the East Celina corridor, near Frontier Parkway, Haraz Coffee House is opening summer 2026 with traditional Yemeni drinks like the Harazi Mufawar with coffee, cardamom and cream, alongside espresso, matcha, and teas. It joins Capo's Pizza & Pasta as one of the two artisanal anchors that give The Creeks its character.

A few miles south, Burn Boot Camp filed a $650,000 fitness center that began construction in April, offering trainer-led high-intensity workouts, nutrition support, and child watch services, with a stated focus on bringing women and families together. That will land at 3520 N. Louisiana Drive.

And on the culinary long-tail, Celina Shops at Light Farms has a distinctly non-chain addition working through its buildout. Hyderabad House is bringing authentic South Indian and Hyderabadi cuisine to the Celina Shops at Light Farms development, known for its rich biryanis, curries, and traditional Hyderabadi dishes. The restaurant is currently in the framing stage, expected to open in 2027, and will add to the expanding variety of international dining options along the Preston Road corridor.

For residents who have been asking whether the food scene on Preston was going to stay chain-only, that is your answer.

A pragmatic note about the road itself

The flip side of a corridor filling in this fast is that the corridor itself is under construction while it fills. Oncor completed comprehensive electric infrastructure inspections in Celina in October 2025 and began a reliability improvement project there in February 2026, with utility work at the Costco site including new utility poles and traffic safety measures — the warehouse is being built inside a road network already under pressure from multiple projects across the city.

Practically, that means the last week of August is going to be interesting. Costco tends to draw a full parking lot for its opening days regardless of market. Home Depot's grand opening, if it lands within the same window, adds a second traffic pattern to the same signal. Residents in Bluewood, Carter Ranch, and the neighborhoods south of Ownsby Parkway should assume the Preston-Ownsby light will need an extra cycle or two for a few weeks. Plan the school run accordingly.

Why this matters beyond the shopping list

There is a small civic story hiding underneath the retail story. Large-format retail generates substantial sales tax revenue, and Celina's municipal budget has been balancing rapid infrastructure investment against the reality that residential development, while fast, does not immediately produce the same tax yield as commercial and retail activity — a Costco at full operation changes that calculus in a meaningful way.

For residents, that translates roughly into this: every trip you now take inside city limits instead of down to Frisco is a trip that helps pay for the road you drove on to get there. It is not the reason to be pleased about the openings. But it is a reason to notice that this August is a slightly bigger deal than a ribbon cutting.

The short version, for anyone who has lived in East Celina long enough to have watched the fields on Preston turn into gravel, then into steel, then into signage: the corner is finally doing what the rooftops promised it would.

If you have been curious what the last two years of construction dust have actually built toward, or you are weighing what the corridor build-out means for your own block, the team at LivingWell Realty lives and works these neighborhoods every week. Reach out anytime, or start with our East Celina neighborhood guide to see how the map is filling in near you.