For four years the north end of Old Naples had a hole in it. The 1946 Naples Beach Hotel came down in 2022, and the 125-acre stretch at 801 Gulf Shore Boulevard North went quiet behind construction fence. On November 17, 2025, that quiet ended: nearly seven years after the city approved the plan and four years after the original hotel came down, the new Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort officially opened to the public, a $1 billion-plus project with a 220-room resort and 153 private residences.
The temptation is to file this as a single event. It isn't. The campus is opening in phases across the entirety of 2026, and the residents getting the most out of it are the ones reading the calendar rather than the address. What's on the beach right now is a different property from what will be there in October, and the gap between the two is where the planning happens.
What's actually open right now
The short version: the front half of the campus is live, the back half is still being built out, and the two most emotionally loaded pieces of the old hotel are back on their original footprints.
- HB's, on the sand where it always sat, reopened with lunch 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., beverage service 3:00 to 5:00, and dinner 5:00 to 9:00, plus a Sunday Beachside Brunch. HB's sits on its original footprint, with expanded deck dining and oversized umbrellas that keep the space usable in every season, and a wine cellar and private dining rooms feel luxurious without flash.
- Sunset Bar, open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily, now runs a Latin-influenced menu under the same open-air roofline residents have used for sunset for decades.
- The Merchant Room, the resort's flagship indoor restaurant, is led by two-time James Beard Award-winning chef Gavin Kaysen from Minneapolis, with a menu that promises a French spin on Gulf flavors.
- 220 guest rooms and 57 suites, the beachfront pools, cabanas, and the resort's 34-foot Hinckley Picnic Boat are all in service.
- Sanctuary Spa is running in-room treatments while the full 30,000-square-foot facility completes.
The important detail for residents: HB's and Sunset Bar are open to non-guests, with reservations available through the resort directly. That is not a formality. It resets the question of whether the north beach end is somewhere you drive to for an occasion or somewhere you walk to on a Tuesday. Chef Fabio Quarta runs the HB's kitchen with pastry from Eddy Dhenin, and the raw bar, crudo, and local catch are the parts of the menu that have earned the strongest early word from the neighborhood.
The lobby itself is worth walking through once even if you are not eating. Look up and you'll see decorative relief panels depicting regional fan palms inset beneath a $300,000 pecky cypress, a native material commonly seen in historic Old Florida homes, and a chandelier composed of curled, gold-leaf fronds continues the palm motif in three dimensions. The porte-cochère has a haint-blue ceiling sheltering gas-lit lanterns and twin rows of Adirondack chairs, and to those who know this shoreline, the shellcrete foundation registers first, a distinctly Floridian cue and a vivid reminder of the wave-like coquina sign that announced the beloved hotel that stood here for 75 years.
What is still coming, and roughly when
The 2026 calendar is where residents can actually plan. The rollout is staged across four quarters, and each phase changes what the property is good for.
Amenity | Expected opening | Why it matters to a resident |
|---|---|---|
Sabal Suite (7,000 sq ft, sixth floor) | Early 2026 | Sets the ceiling for events and multi-generational stays booked at the property |
The Picture House (22-seat cinema) | Q1 2026 | First-run film venue inside Market Square |
FINs Club & Teen Centre | Q1 2026 | Children's programming for visiting grandchildren |
Naples Trading Co. (grab-and-go café) | Q1 2026 | A morning coffee stop that is not a fine-dining reservation |
Sanctuary Spa (full facility) | 2026 | Thermal circuit, 13 treatment rooms, 75-foot rooftop lap pool |
The Wager (gastropub) | 2026 | Four-lane bowling alley, game room and lounge |
The Gardens (Tom Fazio 18-hole course) | Fall 2026 | Old Naples' first on-site golf offering |
A few of these dates deserve a closer look. Sanctuary Spa is a serene, two-level, 30,000-square-foot facility designed to restore, energize, and uplift, with 13 treatment rooms including three spacious VIP suites, an inclusive thermal circuit with aromatherapy steam rooms, Finnish saunas, vitality pools, cold plunge zones, and experiential showers, plus a tranquil 75-foot rooftop lap pool with views of the lush golf course. That is not a slightly larger version of a hotel spa. It is a wellness facility on the scale of a standalone destination, and once the full circuit opens, day passes and memberships are the resident question worth watching.
The Gardens is the one that will reshape shoulder season. The course features precision hitting bays, comfort stations with grab-and-go fare, and a chic clubhouse called The Shed, complete with craft cocktails and casual dining. A Tom Fazio course inside the city limit, on the same campus as beachfront dining, is a combination Naples has not offered before. Whether it is bookable outside the residences is the open question, but the ripple effect on Fifth Avenue's evening traffic is already being modeled by the restaurants down the street.
Market Square is the piece to understand as a single idea rather than a list. It is home to the Naples Trading Company for grab-and-go treats and picnic supplies, a plush private screening room, a regulation four-lane bowling alley, a professional putting green and a curated game room, alongside Sanctuary Spa's 30,000-square-foot bi-level wellness centre with restorative thermal circuit and rooftop lap pool, plus a fully supervised FINs Club for Kids. Read together, that is a small town center folded into a resort, with a coffee stop, a movie house, a bowling alley, a spa, and a kids' club within a five-minute walk of each other.
What actually shifted for people who live here
For most of the last four years, the working coastal geometry of Old Naples ran south. The Pier is offline, Cambier's playground was down through the summer, and Third Street and Fifth Avenue absorbed the evening flow that used to spread further north. The Naples Beach Club reopening pulls a real share of that back to Gulf Shore Boulevard North.
The numbers are quietly aggressive. The Naples Beach Club has been transformed into a $1 billion redeveloped Four Seasons Resort, preserving Old Naples elements and restoring public access to more than 1,000 feet of Gulf shoreline and reintroducing two local landmarks, HB's beachfront restaurant and the Sunset Bar, after years of construction that reshaped both the waterfront and the neighborhood surrounding it. One thousand feet of beach is not a marketing figure; it is roughly ten blocks of shoreline that were effectively private construction site for four years and are now walkable public sand again with two functioning restaurants at the middle of it.
The preservation choices matter for the daily texture of the neighborhood. The team preserved the elements that mattered to the community: the 18-hole Tom Fazio golf course, being redesigned, the Mary C. Watkins Tennis Center and more than 104 acres held in permanent conservation easement. A 104-acre conservation easement inside a redevelopment of this size is unusual, and it is the reason the campus reads as a low-rise property rather than a wall. The first Four Seasons in Southwest Florida carries forward the legacy of the Watkins family, who stewarded the hotel over three generations.
Early diner reaction is doing what early diner reaction does. Opening weeks pulled reservations that ran ahead of the kitchen, and Tripadvisor's first pass on HB's shows the usual gap between people who expected a finished property in November and people willing to wait a few months. The stronger read comes from the neighborhood pattern: these beloved spots have returned in grand style at the new Naples Beach Club, revived with care in their original footprints while being elevated by a Four Seasons signature, dating back decades as local legends and now open for crowds who miss their fresh seafood and those unbeatable Gulf sunsets, whether you are a longtime Naples resident finally checking them out post-reopening or a guest wanting to try a quintessential Naples spot updated with refined taste.
A practical suggestion. Book HB's on a weekday for lunch before the March calendar tightens. Walk into the lobby once for the pecky cypress ceiling and the shellcrete foundation. Watch for the Sanctuary Spa full-facility date; that is the amenity most likely to change day-to-day routines for residents within walking distance. Keep an eye on The Gardens for the fall, because Old Naples has never had a Tom Fazio course inside it before, and the traffic pattern that emerges in November will tell us how much of the evening economy shifts north.
The best way to read the reopening is not as one grand event. It is a rolling calendar, and the pieces that arrive later are the ones that will change how the north end of the neighborhood feels for the people who already live in it.
If you would like a closer read on how the Naples Beach Club campus is influencing values in nearby buildings, or you are simply trying to understand where the north end of Old Naples is heading over the next twelve months, Eileen Komanecky is glad to talk. Let's Connect.
