Ask anyone who drives Gordon Drive on a Tuesday morning when the club is supposed to reopen, and you'll get the same answer: "sometime in 2026." That answer has been technically true for two years and still manages to be wrong every time someone repeats it. The club's own planning brochure once put a number on it: summer 2026. That season is more than half gone as of this writing, and the doors are still closed. The real story isn't that the timeline slipped. It's what it slipped for, and the record of exactly how that happened is public, itemized, and more interesting than the calendar itself.
What actually burned down
The one-story clubhouse at 2900 Gordon Drive was destroyed by Hurricane Ian on September 28, 2022. It had stood since 1959, the social anchor for a neighborhood that has never had much else in the way of shared public space. For a year and a half after Ian, the club operated out of trailers, a fact that shows up in trade coverage almost as an aside but that anyone who tried to book a member dinner during that stretch remembers as the entire point. Members voted to rebuild rather than repair, and what came next was not a renovation. It became a $100 million ground-up construction project on 5.5 acres of an 11-acre parcel, three stories, roughly 62,000 square feet, elevated to current flood standards.
The date that moved, and why
The club's own clubhouse brochure lists the plan in plain language: demolition and construction beginning summer 2024, grand opening summer 2026. That's the promise members were given. But even coverage of the same milestone, Naples City Council's August 21, 2024 approval of the project's conditional-use petition, already described a grand opening in late 2026, not summer. Two documents, produced around the same event, disagreed on the season. By March 2026, one update explicitly walked the target back further, noting the "newest meaningful update" pointed to a fall 2026 opening rather than the summer date circulated earlier.
None of that is a scandal. Construction timelines move. What's worth knowing is that this particular slip has a documented cause, and it isn't rebar shortages or hurricane season. It's a neighbor.
The dispute that cost two million dollars
Terry Mullen owns a $31 million Gulf-front home just south of the club, and he spent the better part of two years opposing the design of the building next door. His objection centered on a third level he argued would add noise and height where none currently exists. The fight went to a roughly 10-hour council hearing on August 21, 2024, and it produced one of the more specific compromises in Naples zoning history: an 11-foot wall between the club and Mullen's property, nearly double the city's standard 6-foot limit, approved by council 5-2 with Mayor Teresa Heitmann and council member Linda Penniman voting against it. Before that hearing even happened, the club had already made roughly $2 million in design changes aimed at satisfying Mullen's concerns, adjustments to the third-level balcony orientation among them.
Design Review Board chair Steve Hruby, an architect himself, described what the finished building was actually going for during the board's final approval a month later. The West Indies vocabulary that shaped Port Royal's original 1950s and '60s architecture was the starting point, he said, but rendered "in a much more sophisticated and in a more almost-resort-style way." That final design sign-off from the DRB didn't come until late September 2024, a full month after the council vote, and getting there required the kind of member-committee back and forth that one board member called an "arduous task" even before Mullen's objections entered the picture. Every one of those weeks is calendar time the original summer 2026 target never accounted for.
What 622 members are actually funding
The club is capped at 700 members, and the rebuild is being financed through a $20 million loan plus a special assessment of $45,000 per member, levied on August 1, 2024. That number did what special assessments tend to do: it prompted an exit. Forty-five members resigned. In an August 9, 2024 letter, club president Nancy Carlson told the remaining membership that 85 percent of those who left were over age 70, a detail worth sitting with, since it suggests the resignations were less a verdict on the project than a function of who was least likely to see a multi-year build through to completion. Twenty-three residents on the waiting list stepped in to fill the gap, and the roster settled at 622.
That's a real number against a real ceiling, and it says something the marketing language around this project rarely does: demand didn't evaporate when the cost got specific. It just changed hands.
What actually reopens
Whenever the doors do open, the building replacing the old single-story clubhouse will include:
- A coffee shop and three signature restaurants with indoor and outdoor Gulf-view dining
- Four bars
- A banquet venue
- A lap pool alongside a separate Gulf-front infinity pool
- Private beach access
- Valet and other parking reserved specifically for Port Royal residents
The team behind it reads like a short list of specialists rather than a generic contractor roster. Hart Howerton, the New York and San Francisco firm with lead architect Tim McCarthy, designed the building. Estero-based Suffolk Construction is the general contractor, close enough to be a familiar name in Southwest Florida construction circles rather than an out-of-market hire. Champalimaud, under Winston Kong, is handling interiors. Outside Productions, a Naples-based landscape firm led by Pat Trefz, drew praise from the Design Review Board for a planting and hardscape plan one board member called a model other projects should follow.
Reading the site now
If you walk or drive Gordon Drive this fall, what you're looking at is a building past its structural approvals and into the part of construction that takes the longest and shows the least visible progress week to week: interior systems, finish work, the coastal engineering that has to satisfy both the Design Review Board and Humiston & Moore, the firm handling the project's shoreline and dune considerations. There's no dramatic unveiling moment coming on a fixed date you can circle. What there is instead is a documented, traceable record of exactly why the club's own summer 2026 promise didn't hold, and a fall 2026 target that, unlike the first one, has already survived one full public correction.
That's usually a sign a date is getting more accurate, not less.
Port Royal's daily rhythm has always run on things that don't show up in a listing description, the club calendar, who's back for season, which dock has a new boat tied to it. If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific property on Gordon Drive, Galleon Drive, or elsewhere south of 21st Avenue, David Auston has spent more than two decades tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Explore My Properties to see what's currently available in Port Royal.
