The Port Royal Club Was Supposed to Reopen by Summer. Here's Where It Actually Stands

Walk Gordon Drive past 2900 this month and the clubhouse still reads as a construction site more than a finished building. Scaffolding wraps sections of the shell. The lot that used to fill with Saturday lunch traffic is staged with equipment and trailers. Four years ago this stretch of beachfront held a one-story clubhouse that had served Port Royal members since 1959. Hurricane Ian took it in a single night on September 28, 2022, and city building officials declared it damaged beyond repair soon after.

Members had a choice at that point: patch the old building back together or start over. They voted to start over, and the number attached to that decision is $100 million, a full ground-up rebuild designed by Hart Howerton with interiors by Champalimaud Design and construction led by Suffolk Construction. The new clubhouse is planned at 62,000 square feet across two stories, with dining rooms oriented toward the Gulf, a beachfront pool, and a lawn built for the kind of member events the old building never had room for.

None of that is in dispute. What has moved, more than once, is when any of it actually opens.

A date that has slid every time it's been checked

The club's own planning materials from late 2023 laid out a timeline with a grand opening in the summer of 2026. That was the number members were given as construction ramped up. By the middle of 2025, public reporting on the project had softened that to a general "late 2026" completion, no longer pinned to a season. By this past March, the language had shifted again, this time to a fall 2026 target, explicitly noted as a change from the earlier summer estimate.

It is now the fall of 2026, and the most recent public updates on the project still describe the opening only as "late 2026," with no firmer date attached. Every checkpoint has moved the target later without ever landing on one. That pattern matters more to a Port Royal resident than any single date does, because it tells you how to plan rather than what to hope for.

If you're timing anything around a specific reopening week, this year's Welcome Back Party in November, a holiday dinner reservation, a wedding, don't build it around a date that hasn't held yet.

What four years of waiting has actually looked like

The gap between the storm and the finished building has not been empty. The club has kept dining running through a temporary tent and food trucks, the arrangement most members have eaten under for going on four years now. That bridge period turned out to be its own small fight. In 2024, the club asked the city to approve a temporary 5,000-square-foot dining tent with modular kitchen trailers, sized for roughly 130 seats. The city initially said no, because Naples code treats anything lasting more than six months as a permanent structure, and the club was asking for coverage that would run two and a half to three years. The club and the city eventually worked out terms that let dining continue, but the exchange is a useful marker of just how long "temporary" has had to stretch here.

Not everything has been on hold. The fitness center sits across the street from the clubhouse site and was untouched by the storm, so members have kept access to the Technogym equipment, personal training, and the nine tennis courts throughout the rebuild. The clubhouse is what's missing. The rest of the club has kept running.

What's finished:

• The fitness and tennis facility across the street, operating on its normal schedule throughout construction
• The clubhouse shell and structural work, now visibly standing on Gordon Drive

What's still temporary or unfinished:

• Formal dining, still running out of a tent and food trucks
• The Gulf-view dining rooms, beachfront pool, and lawn, all part of the finished plan but not yet open
• A confirmed calendar date for any of it

The cost of getting here

A rebuild this size doesn't get funded quietly. The club's own financing plan splits the $100 million across several sources, with insurance proceeds covering the largest single share at roughly 30 percent, followed by member assessment income, a bank loan, cash reserves, and new member initiation fees making up the rest.

That assessment landed on members directly. In August 2025, the club billed a one-time $45,000 assessment per member. The size of that bill, combined with the long wait, was enough to push 45 members to resign, the majority of them over age 70, according to a letter Club President Nancy Carlson sent members that same month. Twenty-three residents on the club's waiting list stepped in to fill those spots, leaving membership at 622 against a cap of 700. The club is still standing at that number as construction continues.

None of this is unusual for a private club rebuild of this scale. It's the specific texture of what four years without a clubhouse has cost the people who belong to it, in dollars and in members who decided the wait wasn't for them.

November is the real test, not the calendar

The club runs on a fairly fixed rhythm most seasons: open from mid-August through mid-July, closed for a month in summer, continental breakfast daily except Monday from November through May, a la carte lunch and dinner Tuesday through Saturday, a Friday night seafood buffet in season, and Sunday brunch and sunset dinner. The traditional marker of the season's start is the club's Welcome Back Party each November, the event that greets members returning to town for the winter.

Given how the completion date has moved every time it's been reported, the honest expectation for this year's Welcome Back Party is that it happens under the same tent and food truck setup members have used for the past several seasons, not inside the finished building. A "late 2026" target that still hasn't specified a month by late September leaves November as an unlikely finish line. Whether the clubhouse opens before the calendar turns to 2027 is a fair question. Whether it opens in time for this year's welcome back is not one the current timeline answers with any confidence.

What isn't waiting on the clubhouse

Not every Port Royal tradition runs through 2900 Gordon Drive. The Marine Industries Association of Collier County's Christmas Boat Parade has run for decades on Naples Bay, and its route takes it directly through Port Royal's own canals, Man-O-War and Morgan Cove, after passing the Naples City Dock and Tin City near the Gordon River Bridge. Public viewing spots line the route at the city dock, Riverwalk Restaurant, Naples Landing, Kelly's Fish House, and Bayview Park, and residents along Man-O-War and Morgan Cove get the parade delivered straight past their own docks. That tradition doesn't depend on a construction schedule. It shows up every December regardless of what's finished on land.

For a neighborhood whose social calendar has spent four years working around one missing building, it's worth remembering how much of Port Royal's rhythm was never tied to that address in the first place.

The clubhouse is expected to open in late 2026. Until it does, dining continues in the tent and food truck setup, and the Christmas Boat Parade will make its usual December pass through Man-O-War and Morgan Cove.

If you're a Port Royal owner who wants a straight read on how this rebuild is progressing, or you're weighing what club membership actually means for a specific property here, Michelle Trawick knows this stretch of Gordon Drive well enough to give you the current picture, not the brochure one. Let's Connect.