What happens when a neighborhood built around a single private beach club spends the better part of four years without it, and the biggest hotel opening in Southwest Florida history lands one mile up Gulf Shore Boulevard in the meantime?
That is the actual question for anyone who has been living inside the Port Royal guard gates since Hurricane Ian took the original clubhouse down in September 2022. The finish line at 2900 Gordon Drive is now in view, but the more interesting fact for a resident is what the ring around the neighborhood looks like in the last stretch of 2026. For a few months, Port Royal will effectively have two beachfront clubs at its five-minute perimeter. One is the one you have been waiting for. The other is a Four Seasons that has been quietly rolling out new rooms every quarter this year, and it is going to change the resident calculus about where to send a guest to lunch or a spouse to a spa appointment.
The Four Seasons Has Quietly Become Port Royal's Interim Club
The Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort, sitting on the 125-acre parcel at 801 Gulf Shore Boulevard North, officially opened to the public on November 17, 2025. That was the headline moment. The more useful story for a Port Royal resident is what has landed there in the eight months since.
The Sanctuary, a 30,000-square-foot wellness destination set across three levels, opened March 18, 2026. That is not a hotel spa in the usual sense. It is a full wellness facility with treatment rooms, thermal circuit, cold plunge zones, and a 24-hour fitness floor designed by Harley Pasternak, and it is bookable a la carte. The flagship restaurant, The Merchant Room, led by two-time James Beard Award-winning chef Gavin Kaysen from Minneapolis, is running now, with a French treatment of Gulf-caught fish that has no real analog in Old Naples. Two names Port Royal residents will recognize from long before Ian, HB's on the Gulf and the Sunset Bar, are both back on the sand.
Read against the fact that the Port Royal Club has been dark since the storm, that is a meaningful substitute set. HB's is genuinely the only true beachfront restaurant in Old Naples at the moment, and it is a seven-minute drive from the guard gate at the top of Galleon.
What Is Still Landing At The Beach Club Before Season
The 2026 rollout is not finished. The Wager, a sports-centric gastropub pairing elevated pub fare with an impressive selection of draught beer, is still to come, along with Four Seasons' first regulation four-lane bowling alley and a professional putting green. So is The Picture House, a 22-seat cinema, and the FINS Kids Club and Teen Centre. The Tom Fazio-designed 18-hole course, initially advertised for a 2026 debut, has slipped. The Tom Fazio golf course is on track for a 2027 opening per the most recent industry reporting.
For a resident deciding how to spend a Wednesday afternoon in October, the practical map at the Four Seasons looks like this:
| Amenity | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|
| HB's on the Gulf | Open |
| Sunset Bar | Open |
| The Merchant Room | Open |
| The Sanctuary spa | Open since March 18 |
| Rooftop lap pool, 24/7 fitness | Open |
| The Wager gastropub | Still to debut in 2026 |
| The Picture House cinema | Still to debut in 2026 |
| FINS Kids Club | Still to debut in 2026 |
| Tom Fazio 18-hole course | Now tracking to 2027 |
The residential side of the property is worth naming for context, not because it is on your dinner rotation but because it explains why the resort is going to feel busier by fall than it does now. The first residence closing occurred in May 2026, a notable 9,000-plus square foot Beach House sold for over $20 million to local developer Phil McCabe, and beach-side inventory is now largely spoken for with only a few units remaining. That first wave of owners is moving in this season.
The Gordon Drive Finish Line, Now Fall
The Port Royal Club rebuild has been the neighborhood's slow-motion event for three and a half years, and the timeline has moved. The new clubhouse is set to open in fall 2026, which is important because earlier reports had pointed to a summer 2026 opening, so the expected opening window has shifted later.
The building itself is worth knowing in specifics rather than in the round. Naples City Council approved a conditional-use petition on August 21 that allows the 65-year-old club at 2900 Gordon Drive to build a larger, three-level clubhouse with indoor and outdoor dining, a new pool and deck, outdoor seating areas, a two-story garage and new landscaping and lighting, elevated and built to current standards after the one-story clubhouse was destroyed by Hurricane Ian on September 28, 2022. The design work is credited to Hart Howerton, with Champalimaud on interiors, and Suffolk Construction as general contractor.
The plan approved by members includes a 62,000-square-foot Gulf-front clubhouse with a coffee shop, three signature restaurants with indoor and outdoor dining overlooking the Gulf, four bars, a banquet venue, a lap pool, and private beach access.
That is what you are getting back in the fall. The other thing to know is that the composition of the membership has already shifted. The club is capped at 700 members, borrowed $20 million to finance construction and assessed members $45,000 on August 1; the cost and wait prompted 45 members to leave, but 23 Port Royal residents on a waiting list then joined, and 85% of those who resigned were over age 70, leaving 622 members. If you have been on the waiting list, that is the mechanism that will have moved you.
One quirk that has not been widely absorbed: the two clubhouses will co-exist as beachfront amenities within a mile of each other, both designed by the same architecture firm. Hart Howerton drew both. Sustainably minded architecture from Hart Howerton and ODP blends with interiors from New York-based Champalimaud Design at the Four Seasons as well. That is not coincidence. It is the same short list of firms that Naples luxury projects at this tier tend to hire, and the visual grammar between the two properties will be closer than a resident might expect.
Third Street South Comes Back Online In November
The third piece of the fall map is the one that does not involve a hard hat. Third Street South spends the summer running at partial capacity, and it reboots in the second week of November. From mid-November through April the Third Street South Farmer's Market resides directly on Third Street South between Broad Avenue South and 13th Avenue South. It is a Saturday-morning fixture, in its 30th year, and it is the marker most Port Royal residents use to say the season has started.
Third Thursdays on Third continues on its monthly cadence, and the walk-in windows at the district's independent restaurants tighten week by week from Halloween through Thanksgiving. As foot traffic drops from peak season walk-in availability opens up at restaurants that require weeks of advance booking in January, so summer is the time to try the places that are usually fully committed, and the inverse is coming fast. If there is a Third Street table you have wanted to sit at in a specific room, the practical window to book without three-week lead times closes around the second Saturday of November.
A Resident's Fall Rotation
If you are already inside the gates, the useful move over the next ten weeks is not to wait for one big opening. It is to work the perimeter before season loads it up.
- Book The Sanctuary at the Four Seasons for a mid-week appointment before Thanksgiving, when the treatment calendar is still soft.
- Take out-of-town guests to HB's for lunch rather than an off-property dinner reservation. It is the only beachfront lunch of that caliber walking distance from the sand.
- If The Merchant Room has been on your list, get on the book for a weeknight in October, before the Kaysen buzz consolidates into a two-month waitlist.
- Confirm your Port Royal Club membership paperwork and enrollment window details directly with the club office. The rebuild has moved a lot of internal dates, and the assessment cycle is worth understanding before your first reservation at the new clubhouse.
- Put the second Saturday of November on the calendar for the Third Street farmers market reopening. The first weekend back is the one worth showing up for.
- If a Fazio round was in your 2026 plan, adjust to 2027. The course is not going to be playable this season.
The reason this matters is not really about any single opening. It is about the fact that for a specific stretch of months, the amenity density at the edge of Port Royal is higher and more varied than it has been at any point in the neighborhood's history. Two Hart Howerton beachfront buildings, two operating beachfront restaurants that a resident can actually walk to, a 30,000-square-foot spa a mile away, a chef with two James Beard medals cooking a mile away, and a private club coming back online at generational scale. That configuration will not last forever. The Fazio course will open, the Port Royal Club rollout will settle into rhythm, and the two properties will stop feeling like a two-for-one and start feeling like fixed geography again. Fall 2026 is the moment before that happens.
Let's Connect
If you already live in Port Royal, this note is a map of your own neighborhood in a moment when the map is genuinely moving. If you are thinking through what any of this means for a specific address, a specific membership question, or a sale timed against the fall opening, that is a conversation worth having in person. Reach out to Nick Solimene to compare notes on how the next six months are shaping up on Gordon Drive and Gulf Shore Boulevard.
