A barrier island of beach houses on pilings, and the pier restaurant where The Summer I Turned Pretty shot its engagement scene.
What Wrightsville Beach looks like
The town runs down a barrier island a few blocks wide, ocean on one side and Banks Channel on the other. Beach houses stand two and three storeys on wood or concrete pilings, with the ground floor left open for parking and storage underneath. The town caps new construction near forty feet. A drawbridge on , with a bascule control tower over the roadway, is the island's only road connection to the mainland.
The older cottages are cedar shingle or painted wood siding, with pitched roofs and small roof decks facing the water. Houses on the channel side run larger and more glass fronted, with private docks and boat lifts built out from the yard. Low hedges line the front walks rather than trees, and a few taller condominium buildings rise behind the dune line near the piers.
Two wooden piers reach past the surf, each holding a restaurant and a fishing platform above the water, the first at the south end of the island and the second farther north. A shingled yacht clubhouse with its own boat slips sits on the channel about halfway up the island. Waynick Boulevard runs the length of the island between them. Houses and small hotels line the road, with a water tower rising above the rooflines.
Shot in Wrightsville Beach
The Summer I Turned Pretty used the island's own waterfront twice, for an engagement scene on the Oceanic's pier deck and for the 's debutante scenes. Dawson's Creek filmed its own pageant scene at a different waterfront restaurant twenty years earlier.
The Summer I Turned Pretty
The Oceanic restaurant on Crystal Pier, played as itself for the show's engagement scene.
The Summer I Turned Pretty, 2022
Belly and Jeremiah announce their engagement on the restaurant's upstairs deck, with Conrad left standing alone on the sand below. The show also used the Carolina Yacht Club, a few blocks north on the channel side, for its debutante scenes. Street View
Dawson's Creek, 1998 to 2003
Joey performs during the Miss Seabreeze Pageant scene at this restaurant on Banks Channel, playing a stage built for the fictional town's pageant night. The dining room sits on pilings over the water, the same channel the town's cottages back onto. Street View
What Wrightsville Beach can double for
Nags Head in Nags Head, North Carolina
Nags Head kept a run of small, unpainted shingled cottages raised on timber pilings along its old beachfront, built from the 1900s through the 1930s in the same raised construction as this island's older stock. Its row sits closer together with no modern houses mixed in, so a street here that has larger new houses among the old ones needs a tighter frame to hold the period. Try searching unpainted cottages on pilings now.
Tybee Island is a similar scale barrier island beach town outside a bigger city, with cottages raised on piers from the 1930s and its own oceanfront fishing pier and pavilion. Its live oaks and Spanish moss inland give the location away in a wide shot, so staying on the beachfront block keeps the match. Try searching cottages raised on piers now.
Folly Beach in Folly Beach, South Carolina
Folly Beach is another barrier island surf town with houses on stilts and its own fishing pier, a rougher edged double for the newer stock mixed among this island's older cottages. Folly's stilt houses are painted in brighter shades and its beach bars read busier than most blocks here, so a quieter, repainted house holds the match better. Try searching houses on stilts now.
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