The Corner That Keeps Changing
Stand at the southwest corner of Preston Road and Ownsby Parkway on any given morning this July, and you will hear it before you see it — the low groan of heavy equipment, the percussion of steel and concrete work finishing its final movements inside a building that is, by any measure, enormous. The structure rising there covers 158,000 square feet, and it sits at the center of a 40-acre mixed-use development called Village at Ownsby Farms. On August 26, 2026, Costco Wholesale will open its doors to Celina for the first time.
For a city that has spent the better part of a decade watching itself transform from a quiet Collin County town into one of the fastest-growing communities in the country, the arrival of a full-scale Costco warehouse is the kind of milestone that tends to make longtime residents stop and sit with a feeling that is equal parts pride and vertigo. Things are different now. And this corner, more than almost any other physical place in Celina at this particular moment, shows exactly how different.
What Is Actually Being Built
The Costco itself is the anchor — the gravitational center around which the broader Village at Ownsby Farms development is organized. At 158,000 square feet, the warehouse is roughly the footprint of two-and-a-half regulation NFL football fields laid side by side. That is not unusual for a Costco, which builds to a consistent and deliberate scale, but the context matters here. This is Celina, a city whose entire downtown square could fit inside the new store’s floor plan with room left over.
The 40-acre Village at Ownsby Farms site is positioned along Preston Road, the north-south corridor that has functioned as the spine of Celina’s commercial growth for years. Ownsby Parkway intersects it at a point that is increasingly central to how new residents experience the city — close to the newer residential neighborhoods pushing outward in every direction, and convenient to the traffic patterns that define daily life for thousands of families who have arrived in Celina over the past several years.
Interior buildout has been active throughout July, the final weeks of preparation before a grand opening that is now just one month away.
Why This Particular Store, in This Particular City, at This Particular Moment
Costco does not open locations casually. The company’s site selection process is famously methodical, and it tends to follow density — or the credible near-term promise of it. In Celina’s case, the numbers have clearly reached a threshold that made the investment make sense.
That matters for residents in a practical way. One of the consistent realities of living in a fast-growing exurban community is that retail infrastructure tends to lag behind population growth. Families arrive, neighborhoods fill in, schools open, and for a stretch of years the commercial amenities that people expect in a city of a given size simply have not caught up yet. Celina has been living that lag. The presence of a Costco warehouse — with its bulk grocery offerings, fuel station, pharmacy, optical department, and the full breadth of what the membership model provides — closes a meaningful gap.
For residents who have been making the drive south to Frisco or west toward other Costco locations, the calculus of that errand is about to change entirely.
Part of a Larger Picture Downtown and Across the City
The Costco opening does not exist in isolation. It lands at a moment when Celina’s economic development apparatus is actively working to shape what kind of commercial city Celina becomes, not just how large it gets.
The Celina Economic Development Corporation has been discussing plans to seek a private operator for a new downtown visitor center and retail destination, part of the city’s forthcoming Downtown Center project. The conversation reflects an awareness that big-box retail and an activated, character-rich downtown are not competing visions — they serve different needs for the same population — and that Celina needs to be intentional about building both simultaneously.
Meanwhile, Celina ISD is preparing to open multiple new school campuses for the 2026–27 school year, including Vasquez Elementary in the Parks of Wilson Creek neighborhood and a new 212,002-square-foot middle school near the Cross Creek neighborhood. A $2.3 billion bond program has also set guaranteed maximum prices for additional elementary campuses, including an Uptown school priced at $52.07 million and a Green Meadows community school at $50.75 million, with construction already underway on both. The school district’s growth, in other words, is running in parallel with the retail and commercial expansion — all of it reflecting the same underlying reality of a city absorbing tens of thousands of new residents and building the infrastructure to serve them.
What the Regulars Already Know
Ask someone who has lived in Celina for more than ten years what this corner used to look like, and the answer will come quickly. There was not much there. Preston Road existed, of course, and the farmland stretching in both directions was part of the visual character of the place — the open sky, the flat horizon, the sense of geographic breathing room that drew a certain kind of family here to begin with.
The tension between that memory and the present tense is something Celina residents navigate constantly. It surfaces at community events, at school board meetings, in casual conversations at the Friday Night Market on the downtown square. Growth is happening, has been happening, and the pace shows no sign of slowing. The question the city keeps returning to — and that projects like Village at Ownsby Farms put into sharp relief — is not whether Celina will change, but whether it can shape that change into something that serves the people who are here now and those who are still arriving.
A Costco is, in one sense, just a warehouse store. It sells bulk olive oil and car tires and birthday cakes in quantities suited for large households. But in the context of a community building itself in real time, it is also a signal — to residents, to other potential retail tenants, to the broader regional market — that Celina has reached a size and a trajectory that major commercial operators are willing to bet on.
August 26
The date is close enough now that the anticipation is becoming concrete. For families planning their membership run, for business owners watching what kind of foot traffic a development of this scale brings to the Preston Road corridor, and for longtime residents curious to see what the finished project actually looks and feels like, August 26 is circled.
The work going on inside that building this week — the final installations, the stocking of shelves, the calibration of all the operational pieces that have to be in place before the doors open — is the last chapter of a construction story that has been visible from Preston Road for months. What comes next is the community’s story, the one that begins the morning the parking lot fills for the first time and Celina adds another coordinate to the map of its own becoming.
