The Port Royal Club Reopens This Fall, and It's Already a Different Club
Most members expect to walk back into the same club they left in 2022, just newer. A bigger building, a nicer pool, three restaurants where there used to be one. What almost nobody talks about is that the club already changed twice before a single member set foot back inside: once when a neighbor's objection rewrote how the building is legally allowed to operate, and once when a five-figure bill quietly decided who still belongs to it.
Hurricane Ian made landfall on September 28, 2022, and the storm surge tore through the Port Royal Club's original 1959 beachfront clubhouse. The damage was bad enough that the membership faced a real choice: repair the old building or start over. They voted to start over, backing a full ground-up rebuild rather than a restoration.
That decision is the reason Port Royal has spent nearly four years without its social anchor. It's also why what comes back this fall bears almost no resemblance to what stood there before.
Before drawings were finalized, the club surveyed its own membership. Participation ran to 65 percent, which is a real sample for a club this size, and the results read like a group that wanted more of what it already had rather than something entirely new. Gulf and beach-view dining ranked highest among stated priorities, followed closely by covered outdoor dining and an indoor-outdoor bar meant to serve as the building's social center, according to the club's own clubhouse brochure.
The team assembled to deliver that wish list carries real weight in coastal design circles: Hart Howerton as lead architect, Suffolk Construction as general contractor, Champalimaud handling interiors. Suffolk's own project page puts the finished clubhouse at roughly 62,000 square feet across three stories, with about 12,000 square feet of covered outdoor space and 10,000 square feet of open-air event area layered in on top of that.
The design that eventually reached Naples City Council wasn't the one members first imagined. A next-door property owner, Terry Mullen, whose own home is valued at roughly $31 million, spent the better part of two years objecting to the plan on grounds of height, noise, traffic, lighting, and lost views. The design process itself ran about 20 months, worked out between the club's roughly 660 members and one persistently unhappy neighbor. Before the matter reached its final hearing, the club made an estimated $2 million in design changes, including moving the pool from 10 feet off Mullen's property line to 80 feet away.
The August 21, 2024 council session ran roughly 10 hours before a unanimous vote approved the conditional-use petition, according to Naples Press's coverage of the meeting. Council also approved an 11-foot privacy wall between the club and Mullen's home, a full 5 feet taller than city code normally allows.
"The only thing that would be incompatible and unacceptable would be to build a 20-foot wall, the Berlin Wall times two," Vice Mayor Terry Hutchison told the council during the hearing.
The approval came with conditions that will govern how the finished building runs, not just how it looks. The third level's after-dinner lounge balcony has to stay enclosed rather than open to the air. The second level's sunset bar has sliding doors that must close once the space reaches half capacity. If the club racks up three confirmed noise violations in any 12-month stretch, it has to go back before council to answer for it. Those aren't design notes. They're operating rules baked into the building's certificate of occupancy, and they'll apply to every member who walks in after opening day, whether they were involved in the dispute or not.
Construction of this scale doesn't get funded quietly. The club borrowed $20 million toward the project and levied a $45,000 per-member assessment on August 1, 2024. The bill landed hard enough that 45 members chose to resign rather than pay it. Club President Nancy Carlson wrote to the membership shortly afterward noting that 85 percent of those who left were over age 70, a detail that suggests the assessment fell heaviest on longtime residents who'd already gotten what they wanted from their membership years ago.
Twenty-three Port Royal residents who'd been sitting on the waiting list stepped in to fill the vacancies. The club is capped at 700 members. After the resignations and the new admissions, membership settled at roughly 622. That means the room members return to this fall will have a meaningfully different roster than the one that left in 2022, filled in part by neighbors who spent years waiting for exactly this opportunity.
The project's public timeline has already shifted once. Early reporting pointed to a summer 2026 grand opening. By March of this year, updated guidance had pushed that to fall 2026, without a more specific date attached. As of this writing in early August, Port Royal is inside the final stretch of a countdown that got recalibrated once already, for a building that has to meet elevated post-Ian construction standards on a Gulf-front lot where every additional foot of height, every mechanical system, and every structural tie-back gets scrutinized twice over.
When the doors do open, members will find a building organized almost entirely around the priorities they voted on. Planning materials describe a coffee shop, three signature restaurants with indoor and outdoor Gulf-facing seating, four separate bars, a banquet room sized for gatherings of more than 150 guests, and a modern wellness and fitness center, all rising on roughly half of the club's 11-acre beachfront site at 2900 Gordon Drive. The design adds a Gulf-front infinity pool that wasn't part of the original 1959 clubhouse. Private beach access, chairs and umbrellas included, comes standard the way it always has.
None of that is surprising. It's what a $100 million rebuild of a beachfront social club should look like. What's easy to miss, buried under the renderings and the square footage, is that the building members are about to walk into already carries the fingerprints of one neighbor's two-year objection and the exit of dozens of longtime residents. The architecture is new. So is a meaningful share of who'll be standing at the bar.
For a neighborhood where the club has always functioned as much of the social fabric as the homes themselves, the last stretch before opening is worth paying attention to, whether or not real estate is on your mind this month. The Silvers Group keeps a running file on the clubhouse's construction milestones as part of the work we do inside Port Royal every week, and we're happy to walk you through what we're seeing on the ground, whether you're a longtime member curious about the roster or simply keeping an eye on the neighborhood you call home.
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