The lot at 2900 Gordon Drive has been under scaffolding for close to two years now. Members who drive past on their way to the beach have watched the frame rise level by level, and most conversations at dinner parties eventually land on the same question: when does it actually open. The honest answer is late 2026. That target itself has already moved once. The Port Royal Club's own clubhouse brochure, published during the design phase, listed a Summer 2026 grand opening. By the time the project cleared its final city approvals in August 2024, the timeline being reported publicly had shifted to late 2026. For members waiting on a firm date, that slip might read as a setback. It's worth noticing something else instead: today is August 17, 2026, which is roughly the point in the calendar when the Club has traditionally been closed anyway.
The Club Was Never Really Closed
According to the Club's own federal nonprofit filing, Port Royal Club has historically operated from mid-August through mid-July, closing for a single month each year, the stretch from roughly mid-July to mid-August. That means the building's slow crawl toward a late 2026 finish is landing on top of a pause the Club already takes every summer, not on top of an unbroken run of normal operations. The Club has been working to bridge that gap since the storm. Just a week before the project's final design approval in September 2024, Naples City Council actually turned down the Club's request for a temporary 5,000-square-foot, 130-seat dining tent with modular trailers for a kitchen and staff, a sign of just how much effort has gone into keeping some version of club life running while the permanent building was still years away.
Put those two facts together and the picture changes. This isn't a community that's been fully dark for two years waiting on a switch to flip. It's a club that already goes quiet for about a month most summers, and is now stretching that same kind of bridge period over a longer timeline while a $100 million building gets finished around it. The regular seasonal restart that happens every year regardless of construction is simply arriving in a new building this time.
What's Actually New Inside the Building
The new clubhouse is a different scale than what stood on that site before. The original 65-year-old, one-story building was destroyed by Hurricane Ian on September 28, 2022. Its replacement, which cleared its last regulatory hurdle when Naples' Design Review Board granted final design approval on September 25, 2024, roughly two years to the week after the storm, takes the clubhouse from about 32,000 square feet to about 77,000 square feet. It also grows in height, reaching 48.6 feet once base elevation, storm surge, and wind-load requirements were factored in, up from a 30-foot starting point. The design comes from Hart Howerton, an architecture firm with offices in New York and San Francisco, with Estero-based Suffolk Construction handling the build and Naples-based Outside Productions leading the landscaping design. Council's August 21, 2024 conditional-use approval and the Design Review Board's unanimous September vote came after members themselves had already weighed in: the design received unanimous support from the city's Planning Advisory Board and 93 percent approval from Club members. Cost estimates moved during that process too, from roughly $90 million reported earlier in 2024 to the $100 million figure attached to the project by the time of final approval, a reminder that even a members-only rebuild with near-unanimous buy-in isn't immune to the kind of cost creep any major renovation runs into.
The project sits within the Club's roughly 11-acre property, with the approved petitions covering 5.5 of those acres.
The Club's own floor plans for the upper level lay out what members will actually walk into: an a la carte dining room with both indoor and outdoor porch seating, a separate private dining room with its own porch, a main bar with indoor and outdoor seating, a distinct pool bar, and a wine cellar with individual member wine lockers. The approved plans also add a Gulf-front infinity pool and a two-story parking garage, on top of a new pool deck and additional outdoor seating areas. None of that existed in the old single-story building. It's the difference between one dining room doing every job and a layout built around separating a quiet dinner from a pool-bar afternoon.
One more detail from the approval hearings shows how tightly this project had to thread the needle of being a large building inside a residential neighborhood. Council voted 5-2 to approve an 11-foot wall between the Club and a neighboring $31 million, 7,752-square-foot beachfront estate to the south, well above the six-foot limit city code normally allows. The homeowner had purchased that property 14 months before Hurricane Ian and raised concerns about noise, traffic, lights, and views once the new, closer clubhouse design took shape. In response, the Club made $2 million in design changes and moved its pool 80 feet from the property line, up from an original 10 feet. It's a small footnote next to the headline construction numbers, but it says something real about what it means to build at this scale on a quiet residential street rather than a standalone commercial parcel.
What Stays Exactly the Same
For as much as the building is changing, the rituals members actually show up for are staying put. The Club's own federal filings describe a continental breakfast served every morning except Mondays from November through May, a la carte lunch and dinner Tuesday through Saturday, a seafood buffet on many Friday nights in season, and a Sunday routine of brunch followed by a sunset dinner to close the weekend. None of that changes because the walls around it are new.
Nine Hydro-Grid tennis courts and a pro shop remain the anchor of the Club's athletic life, alongside a fitness center built around Technogym equipment and access to personal training, Pilates, massage, and facial treatments. Private events for up to 300 guests, the kind of number that covers a wedding or a milestone birthday, have been part of the Club's capacity for years and aren't going away. None of this requires the new building to feel new to members. It requires the new building to keep doing what the old one did, just with more room and a Gulf view from more tables.
A Different Roster Walks Through First
The building isn't the only thing that changed while everyone waited. On August 1, 2024, the Club assessed members $45,000 each to help finance construction, on top of borrowing $20 million toward the project. That bill was enough to push 45 members out the door. In an August 9, 2024 letter to remaining members, Club President Nancy Carlson wrote that 85 percent of those who resigned were over age 70, a detail that says something about who found the assessment easiest to walk away from. Twenty-three residents on the waiting list joined to take their place, leaving membership at 622, against a cap of 700.
That's not a dramatic membership crisis, especially set against the 93 percent member approval the design itself received. It's a quieter, more incremental shift: a modest reduction concentrated among the Club's longest-tenured, oldest members, replaced by a smaller number of new entrants from the waitlist. The group walking through the new doors will be a little different from the one that walked out of the old building after Hurricane Ian, not because Port Royal changed, but because a $45,000 bill has a way of sorting out who stays and who doesn't.
What This Means If You're Already Counting Down
If you're a member watching for the actual opening date, the practical takeaway is to treat "late 2026" the way you'd treat any construction timeline that has already slipped once, from the brochure's original Summer 2026 target to the figure attached to the project after final city approval. That kind of movement suggests the Club is still working through the sort of finishing details that push completion dates later rather than earlier. The more reliable signal will be direct communication from the Club rather than the season attached to the latest headline.
In the meantime, the rhythm long-time members already know, mid-August restarts, a quiet month somewhere in the calendar, a season that runs its full course from November through May, isn't going anywhere. The building is bigger. The wait has been long. But the season you're used to is still the season you're going to get, just with a wine cellar and a dedicated pool bar instead of one dining room doing every job.
For residents who want a closer look at what makes Port Royal distinct beyond the Club itself, from Gordon Drive's deepwater docks to the neighborhood's position between the Gulf and Naples Bay, our Port Royal neighborhood guide covers the parts of daily life here that don't show up in a construction update.
Whether you're weighing a move within Port Royal or just keeping an eye on how the neighborhood is evolving this season, The Abreu Group is always glad to talk through what's changing and what it might mean for you. Schedule a Private Consultation whenever the timing is right.
