The Port Royal Club just came back from its annual month off, the same way it has for decades: closed sometime in the deep heat of summer, doors open again by mid-August, right on schedule according to the club's own federal filings. If you walked up to the service window this week expecting the rhythm to feel familiar, it will. What's changed is everything underneath that rhythm.
Hurricane Ian destroyed the original 1959 building on September 28, 2022. Four years later, members are still walking into a tent and a lineup of food trucks instead of a clubhouse, and the date the replacement finally opens is not something anyone can currently say with confidence.
The Calendar Didn't Wait for the Building
Under normal circumstances, the Port Royal Club runs from mid-August through mid-July, closing for roughly a month each summer before members trickle back for the start of season. That calendar hasn't moved. What has moved is what's waiting for members when they arrive. Since Ian, "the club" has meant a dining tent and a rotation of food trucks standing in for a building that was supposed to be finished by now.
The full social calendar doesn't really start until November, when the club traditionally throws its Welcome Back Party for members returning with their families for the season. That's still on the books this year. So is the Friday night seafood buffet, the Sunday brunch, and the Sunday sunset dinner that run from November through May. The fitness center across Gordon Drive, with its Technogym equipment and nine Hydro-Grid tennis courts, has never stopped operating and isn't affected by any of this. Those traditions are the constant. The building behind them is the variable.
Why the Tent Has Lasted This Long
Members have been eating out of a tent for four years instead of a proper temporary dining hall for a specific reason. The club actually asked the city for something better: a 5,000-square-foot, 130-seat temporary dining tent with 1,632 square feet of modular trailers for a kitchen and staff. Naples City Council said no. City code defines "temporary" as six months. What the club was asking for would have run two and a half to three years, and the council wasn't willing to stretch the definition that far, even for a project with this much community support behind it.
That denial is why the interim setup has stayed modest for so long. It also explains why the wait has felt longer to members than a straightforward construction delay would. The club wasn't just waiting on a building. It was waiting on a building while operating out of infrastructure the city itself said shouldn't exist for this length of time.
Who's Actually at the Buffet Line This Year
The rebuild has changed more than the physical plant. It has changed who's still a member.
To finance the $100 million project, the club borrowed $20 million and assessed each member $45,000 on August 1, 2024. That bill, combined with the wait itself, pushed a real number of longtime members out the door.
| Count | Detail | |
|---|---|---|
| Members who resigned | 45 | 85% were over age 70, per Club President Nancy Carlson's August 9, 2024 letter to members |
| New members admitted | 23 | Filled in from the associate waitlist |
| Current membership | 622 | Against a hard cap of 700 |
Read plainly, that means the members who had been showing up to that Friday seafood buffet for twenty or thirty years, largely the club's oldest cohort, are the ones who decided the assessment and the wait weren't worth it. The seats they left behind went to newer Port Royal owners who'd been waiting for a spot to open. If the dining room feels like it has a different mix of faces this season than it did five years ago, that's not atmosphere. That's the actual roster.
The Building a Neighbor Helped Redesign
The clubhouse that's eventually going up at 2900 Gordon Drive isn't the design the club originally proposed either. Its final shape was negotiated, section by section, at a ten-hour City Council hearing on August 21, 2024, largely because of one neighbor.
Terry Mullen, whose beachfront home sits just south of the club and was valued at $31 million, objected to the new three-level clubhouse on grounds of noise, views, traffic, lights, height, and smell. Before the hearing even happened, the club made $2 million in design changes to address his concerns. Council then attached conditions of its own: the third level's after-dinner lounge will have its south-facing balcony fully enclosed rather than open-air, and the second level's sunset bar will have its sliding doors closed once the space reaches 50% occupancy. Council also approved an 11-foot wall between the two properties, nearly double the standard six-foot limit, on a 5-2 vote. If Code Enforcement confirms three noise violations within any 12-month stretch, the club has to come back before Council to answer for it.
None of that changes the club's footprint or its amenities. It changes the feel of being inside it. A sunset bar that closes its doors once it gets busy plays differently than one that stays open to the breeze all night. That's the version members will eventually walk into, not the one from the original renderings.
So When Does the Building Actually Open
Here the record gets genuinely unsettled, and the honest answer is that no single source agrees. The club's own 2023 planning materials listed a "Summer 2026" grand opening, and that date circulated through most of 2025. A more recent update, from March 2026, pushed the expected window to fall 2026 instead, citing shifts in construction progress. Other sources from the same period simply describe the completion as "late 2026" without committing to a specific season.
What's certain is this: summer 2026 has now come and gone, and there's no clubhouse standing at 2900 Gordon Drive. Whatever the actual month turns out to be, members are heading into this season, again, on the same tent and the same food trucks they've used since 2022, with a completion date that keeps moving rather than arriving.
What This Season Actually Looks Like
If you're a Port Royal resident wondering what walking back into the club this year will feel like, here's the honest version. The reopening happened on schedule, the way it always does in mid-August. The real season, with the Welcome Back Party, the Friday buffet, and the full dining calendar, starts building toward November like it always has. The tennis courts and the fitness center across the street haven't changed at all.
What's different is the building you're not eating in, the neighbor whose complaint reshaped the balcony you'll eventually sit on, and the roster of people you'll actually see there, thinner by 45 of the club's longest-standing members and refilled by 23 who'd been waiting their turn. That's not a story about property values. It's just what another season under canvas actually looks like from the inside.
If the changing shape of the neighborhood, from the club's construction timeline to what it might mean for your own address on Gordon Drive, has you curious about where things stand, Kevin L Fuller works Port Royal closely enough to walk you through it. Request a custom home valuation and get a straight read on what's happening on your street, not just at the club.
