The Plaza That Does What Wexford's Front Gate Won't Allow
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Drive out through Wexford's gatehouse onto William Hilton Parkway and the first building you pass isn't part of Wexford at all. It's the Village at Wexford, a low-slung shopping center holding more than 30 storefronts, and the plantation's own covenants are the reason it has to exist where it does. Wexford was built to keep commercial activity out. That decision, made when the community launched in the early 1980s, is still the reason residents drive across the road for dinner instead of walking to it.
This isn't a complaint about Wexford. It's a structural fact about how a private harbor-and-golf community actually functions day to day, and it explains why the plaza sitting just outside the gate has quietly become the place where Wexford residents run into each other more often than they do inside.
Wexford's amenities are genuinely unusual for Hilton Head. The community's private harbor covers roughly 37 acres and stays at least 8 feet deep year-round through a tide-free lock system, letting boats up to 70 feet come and go on a schedule the tide doesn't control. We've written before about how that lock actually works. The clubhouse overlooking that harbor has its own restaurant and lounge, renovated in a multi-million dollar project, with a menu that changes regularly.
But that restaurant serves members and their guests. It isn't open to the public, and neither is anything else inside the gate. Wexford's covenants were written to keep it that way: no public commercial activity, no storefronts, no walk-in traffic. It's a private residential plantation, not a village. That's the point of paying for the gate.
Which means every ordinary errand a resident needs, a haircut, new glasses, a pasta dinner that isn't club night, has to happen somewhere else. For most of Wexford, that somewhere else is a short drive down William Hilton Parkway.
The Village at Wexford's restaurant lineup does most of the heavy lifting. Ombra Cucina Italiana is run by chef Michael Cirafesi, who has been voted Best Chef Hilton Head Island for seven years running, and the menu leans into Italian cocktails and a wine list built around Italian benchmarks alongside the pasta program.
Michael Anthony's Cucina Italiana is the other anchor, and it's been in the plaza long enough to have its own second act. According to Eater's Carolinas restaurant guide, it's been an Italian fixture on the island since 2002, run by the Fazzini family and known for made-daily pastas including a tagliatelle alla bolognese. The same building holds a separate, more casual spinoff called the Market Cafe, plus a working cooking school where a resident chef runs weekly demonstration classes, the kind of thing that turns a random Thursday into a reason to leave the house.
Round it out with the British Open Pub, a longstanding stop for a casual pint and a Reuben, and Java Burrito Company, which handles the coffee-and-burrito end of the day that the Italian restaurants don't touch. None of this is resort dining built for a week of vacation. It's a rotation built for people who eat there fifty times a year.
The restaurants get the reviews, but the plaza's real utility for a Wexford resident is in the businesses that never make anyone's vacation itinerary. The current tenant roster includes:
That's a haircut, a pair of glasses, a chiropractor appointment, and a gift for a grandchild's birthday, all inside the same parking lot, all without leaving the plaza that Wexford's own covenants pushed outside its gate. It functions less like a shopping center and more like the commercial district Wexford was never allowed to build for itself.
There's a small irony sitting in the middle of all this. A real estate office keeps a storefront in the same plaza, doing exactly the kind of business that Wexford's covenants prohibit from operating inside the gate itself. The properties being marketed and shown from that storefront are the ones sitting on the other side of William Hilton Parkway, behind a gate that won't let the office that sells them set up shop any closer.
It's a small detail, but it says something true about how privacy and commerce actually divide up in a community like Wexford. The gate controls who drives in. It never controlled where the transactions happen.
None of this changes what Wexford offers. The lock system, the private harbor, the Arnold Palmer course renovated in 2011, all of that is real and unusual for the island. But the daily rhythm of living there depends on a plaza the plantation doesn't own, staffed by a chef with seven Best Chef titles, a family restaurant into its third decade, and a dozen small businesses that never show up in the brochure. Anyone deciding whether Wexford fits their next chapter is really deciding whether that short drive across William Hilton Parkway feels like a commute or just part of the address.
If you're weighing what daily life inside Wexford's gates actually looks like, from the harbor to the plaza across the road, Kelly Ruhlin can walk you through both sides of it over coffee, no obligation attached.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
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