Fall arrives tomorrow, and with it the start of the season that has organized daily life in Port Royal for six decades: the Friday night seafood buffet, the wine dinners, the holiday galas that run from October through May before the neighborhood empties out for summer. For four consecutive years, that season has started the same way. Without the clubhouse.
The Port Royal Club's own planning materials once pointed to a summer 2026 grand opening. City reporting after the project's approval in 2024 pushed that to late 2026. The most recent public update, from March of this year, pushed it again to fall 2026. As of this week, no confirmed reopening date has been announced. If one doesn't land in the coming weeks, the 2026-27 season will be the fifth in a row that members start without the building that has anchored the neighborhood since 1959.
Three Opening Dates in Three Years
The club's own clubhouse brochure laid out a construction timeline that ran from a site plan petition filed in October 2023 through a building permit application in May 2024, with demolition and construction beginning that summer and a targeted grand opening of summer 2026. That timeline came directly from the club, before a single wall had gone up.
By the time Naples City Council actually approved the project on August 21, 2024, coverage of that vote described the grand opening as "late 2026," a small but real drift from the club's own summer target. Then, in a March 2026 update on the project's progress, the window shifted again to fall 2026, explicitly walking back the earlier summer estimate.
Three different windows, each one later than the last, and none of them has produced an actual date. That pattern matters more than any single estimate. Construction timelines slip in one direction on projects like this, and members planning their season around a reopening that keeps receding by a few months at a time are better served knowing the slippage itself is the story, not the latest guess at a date.
The Neighbor Who Changed Three Rooms
The August 2024 approval didn't come easily. Council spent roughly ten hours across hearings responding to objections from Terry Mullen, whose beachfront home next to the club site was valued at $31 million. His concerns centered on noise, sightlines, traffic, lighting and building height, and before the final hearing the club had already made about $2 million in design changes to address them, including moving the pool 80 feet away from his property line, up from an original 10 feet.
Council still granted Mullen concessions the brochure renderings don't show. The wall between the club and his home will stand 11 feet tall, nearly double the city's standard 6-foot cap, approved on a 5-2 vote. The third level's after-dinner lounge, originally conceived with an open south-facing balcony, will be enclosed instead. The second level's sunset bar, designed around sliding doors that open onto the Gulf breeze, will have those doors close automatically once the space reaches 50 percent occupancy. And the approval carries a compliance trigger: if code enforcement confirms three separate noise violations within the first 12 months of operation, the club has to return to council to address them.
None of that shows up in a floor plan. It shows up the first time a member on the third-level lounge realizes the wall he expected to see through is enclosed, or the first Friday night the sunset bar fills up enough to seal itself off from the water it was built to frame.
What 62,000 Square Feet Actually Means
The club's brochure describes a 62,000-square-foot, two-story clubhouse: a living room, a sunset bar, two family casual dining rooms, a flex dining space, a main kitchen, a banquet room with its own pre-function area, and a pool and beach kitchen serving cabanas, a shade garden and a beach-level lawn, all reached through a brick-paver entry off Gordon Drive that loops through a roundabout, a porte cochere, and an open-air breezeway to the Gulf.
That 62,000-square-foot figure describes the member-facing clubhouse. The conditional-use petition that actually went before council authorized the total permitted building area on the site to grow from 32,000 to 77,000 square feet, a jump that accounts for the two-story parking garage, storage facilities and staff areas the brochure lists separately from the clubhouse itself. The petitions covered roughly half of the club's approximately 11-acre property. A member reading "62,000 square feet" and picturing the entire footprint of what's being built there is picturing something smaller than what's actually going up.
Who's Actually Waiting
The Port Royal Club caps membership at 700. On August 1, 2024, members were billed a $45,000 special assessment, part of financing that included a $20 million construction loan. In a letter to members eight days later, Club President Nancy Carlson disclosed that 45 members had resigned in response, and that 85 percent of those who left were over the age of 70. Twenty-three names from the waiting list joined to fill the gap, leaving the roster at 622.
The age skew is the more telling number than the resignation count itself. A multi-year closure lands differently on a member in their 70s or 80s than on a member decades younger, and the letter's own breakdown suggests the departures were driven less by the assessment or the design than by a calculation about how many more seasons a given member expected to use the finished building. What didn't happen is equally worth noting: the waitlist backfilled almost immediately, which means demand for the eventual reopened club held steady even through a stretch when nobody could say with certainty when it would reopen.
The Season Nobody's Renaming
The clubhouse being under construction hasn't meant the club going dark. Reports on the redevelopment describe temporary on-site services and accommodations that have kept some continuity of club life running through the rebuild, even without the finished facility. In ordinary years, the Port Royal Club operates from mid-August through July with a one-month closure, and its social calendar concentrates in the October-through-May window, the same stretch the neighborhood is entering this week.
Membership mechanics haven't paused for construction either. A new owner of an eligible property still has 90 days from purchase to join as a full member. Owners who choose not to join can retain eligibility for up to five years by paying 25 percent of the current joining fee and 25 percent of annual dues each year. Let that lapse entirely and reinstatement costs 75 percent of the joining fee at whatever rate is current when you come back. None of those clocks care whether the clubhouse has a roof.
What residents are actually walking into this fall is a fifth season of the same uncertainty, with three previous target dates already missed and a fourth one, fall 2026, that has yet to produce an announcement. The building taking shape at 2900 Gordon Drive will eventually open. When it does, it will include an enclosed lounge and a bar with doors that close themselves once enough people show up, both of them the direct result of a two-year negotiation with one house next door. That's worth knowing before the ribbon actually gets cut, not after.
If you're weighing a purchase in Port Royal, Aqualane Shores or anywhere else along Naples' waterfront and want a clearer read on how a specific property's club eligibility, dock rights or renovation history actually works, The Kim Price Group is a call away. Work With Kim — Request a Private Consultation.
