Nearly ten months ago, ribbons were cut at 801 Gulf Shore Boulevard North, HB's reopened its dining room for the first time since the wrecking ball came through, and every hospitality outlet on the Gulf Coast ran some version of the same headline: the Naples Beach Club had arrived. If you live in Coquina Sands, you probably read one of those pieces, nodded, and went back to whatever you were doing before dinner.
Here is what those headlines left out. The pieces of the Naples Beach Club that actually change a Coquina Sands resident's week, the golf course sitting on your southern boundary, the gastropub, the cinema, the sidewalk you'd use to walk there, were not part of that November opening. They arrive this fall, a full year after the champagne, and the reason for the delay has almost nothing to do with construction schedules in the ordinary sense. It has to do with keeping trucks off your street.
What Was Actually Open Last November
The resort that opened on November 17, 2025 was real, but it was a hotel opening, not a neighborhood opening. HB's came back as a beachfront restaurant on the same stretch of sand it occupied under the old Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club. Sunset Bar reopened with its long-standing reputation for golden hour intact. The Merchant Room, led by two-time James Beard Award winner Gavin Kaysen, opened alongside them and picked up a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence in June of this year. Naples Trading Company, the property's grab-and-go café, was running. The Racquet Club, built on the site's history as the old Mary C. Watkins Tennis Center, came back with six Har-Tru courts.
All of that is genuine and all of it has been open for close to a year. None of it is the part of the project that determines whether Coquina Sands feels different to live in day to day. That part was still under construction, on purpose, for reasons that have more to do with your street than with the resort's timeline.
The Access Road Nobody Mentions
Buried in a November 2025 letter from the Gulf Shore Association of Condominiums is the detail that explains almost everything about why this fall, not last fall, is when the rest of the property becomes real. The Gardens, the new Tom Fazio-designed 18-hole golf course, was held to a fall 2026 opening specifically because its completion was tied to a construction access road built to keep construction traffic out of Coquina Sands entirely.
That is not a scheduling footnote. It means the developer chose a longer build timeline over routing trucks and equipment through Coquina Sands' own streets for the better part of a year. The golf course, a 100-acre course carved into what was previously the old hotel's fairways, is arriving later than the hotel rooms and restaurants because the alternative was heavier traffic on the roads Coquina Sands residents use every day. If you've spent the past ten months wondering why the course kept slipping, that's the answer. It wasn't a construction delay in the usual sense. It was a decision made in your favor.
Your Own Street Is Part of the Same Project
The same completion trigger applies to Gulf Shore Boulevard North itself. According to the association's letter, the road's full reopening depends on the City of Naples finishing its water line along Gulf Shore Boulevard North and the north outfall pump station on 8th Avenue North. Once that city infrastructure work wraps, the boulevard gets new medians planted with shade trees, upgraded paver sidewalks, safer crosswalks with a pedestrian warning light system, and new bike lanes on both sides of the road, with additional shade tree plantings extending onto Oleander Drive.
For a neighborhood that already prides itself on being walkable, this is not a cosmetic upgrade. It's the difference between a boulevard shared uneasily with construction equipment and one built for the kind of morning walk or evening bike ride that Coquina Sands residents have been doing for decades, just without dedicated lanes to do it in. The timing lines up with the golf course opening for the same reason: both were waiting on the same underlying infrastructure work to clear.
What's Actually Open Versus What's Still Coming
| Amenity | Status as of September 2026 | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| HB's | Open since November 2025 | Beachfront restaurant, revived from the original property |
| Sunset Bar | Open since November 2025 | Waterfront bar, live music, golden hour crowd |
| The Merchant Room | Open since November 2025 | Chef Gavin Kaysen, Wine Spectator Award of Excellence, June 2026 |
| Naples Trading Co. | Open | Grab-and-go café in Market Square |
| The Racquet Club | Open | Six Har-Tru courts |
| The Wager | Opens October 2026 | Sports gastropub, four-lane bowling alley, putting green |
| The Picture House | Opens fall 2026 | 22-seat first-run cinema |
| The Gardens | Opens fall 2026 | Tom Fazio-designed 18-hole course, 100 acres |
Look at that list again. Everything in the top half is hospitality, built to serve overnight guests. Everything in the bottom half is the part that gives a next-door neighborhood something to actually use: a place to watch a game, a movie theater within walking distance, a golf course where there used to be one before the property closed.
The 104 Acres That Aren't Going Anywhere
One more detail from the reporting on this project deserves more attention than it's gotten locally. More than 104 acres of the 125-acre site have been placed into permanent conservation easement. On a stretch of coastline where undeveloped land keeps getting harder to find, that easement is a commitment that doesn't expire with a change in ownership or a shift in the market. For Coquina Sands, which sits with the golf course as its southern boundary, that permanent green buffer is arguably a bigger long-term factor in the neighborhood's character than any single restaurant opening.
The residential side of the project, 153 private residences split between 58 beachside and 95 golfside homes developed with Discovery Land Company, is still rolling out in phases that extend into 2028. That's worth knowing not because it changes anything for you this month, but because it's a reminder that "grand opening" was never a single date for this property. It's been a sequence, and Coquina Sands is only now reaching the part of that sequence built for people who already live here.
What This Actually Means for Your Fall
If you've been treating the Naples Beach Club as a finished chapter since last November, this is the season to revise that. The Wager opens in October with its bowling lanes and putting green. The Picture House follows sometime this fall with first-run movies within a walk of home. The Gardens opens on the same timeline, giving the neighborhood its first on-site golf course since the original property closed. And the boulevard itself, medians, sidewalks, bike lanes, crosswalks, comes online on the same schedule, because it always depended on the same piece of city infrastructure work.
None of this required a decade of patience. It required about ten months, and the wait was deliberate. Coquina Sands didn't get shortchanged by a slow construction timeline. It got a construction access road built specifically to spare its own streets, and everything that's opening this fall is what was on the other side of that decision.
If you're weighing what a property near this stretch of Gulf Shore Boulevard North is actually worth once the rest of this opens, that's a conversation grounded in specifics, not guesswork. The Kim Price Group tracks these projects as they move, not just when the press releases go out. Work With Kim: request a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what this fall's openings mean for your own address.
