Drive down Gordon Drive today and the Port Royal Club site still reads as a construction lot: fencing, staged materials, a footprint where the old one-story clubhouse used to sit before Hurricane Ian tore through it on September 28, 2022. What you'll also notice, if you know where to look, is a finished wall along the property's south edge, eleven feet of it, fully landscaped, running roughly 150 feet before it steps down to six. That wall is the most complete thing on the property right now. It's also the most reliable clue anyone has about how this project is actually going, and it tells a more honest story than any grand-opening date the club has issued.
Members have been told the new clubhouse would open in the summer of 2026. Then late 2026. Then, by this spring, fall 2026. No confirmed reopening month has been made public since. If you're a member wondering when you get your dining room back, the calendar keeps moving. The wall doesn't. It was designed, litigated, approved and built months ago, and it's a better gauge of where the $100 million rebuild actually stands than any announcement about ribbon-cutting.
The Season That Keeps Sliding
The club's own 2023 capital-plan brochure set the target plainly: demolition and construction beginning summer 2024, grand opening summer 2026. That's the baseline every subsequent report has drifted away from. By mid-2024, as the project moved toward its final city hearings, Gulf Shore Business and Club + Resort Business were both reporting a grand opening in late 2026 rather than summer. When Naples City Council finally approved the conditional-use petition on Aug. 21, 2024 after roughly ten hours of hearings, Naples Press covered the same late-2026 target. By this spring, the language in circulation had shifted again, to fall 2026.
None of that is dishonest. Large coastal construction projects run into permitting timelines, material lead times and weather windows that no brochure can fully anticipate. But three years of season-by-season slippage is worth naming plainly rather than repeating the newest guess as if it were firm. If you're a member planning a winter season around the new dining room, the safer assumption is that the calendar is still moving and the club hasn't locked a month.
Mark Wilson, co-chair of the club's Building & Design Committee, put the reasoning behind the long runway to Council directly: the plans reflect "building for today and multiple generations to come." That's a fair description of the ambition. It's a less useful description of when the doors open.
What Members Have Already Paid, Regardless of the Calendar
Whatever month the clubhouse actually opens, one part of this project has already happened and is locked in. The club's own capital-plan document set a member assessment of $45,000, due August 1, 2024, with an installment option spreading payments across five years, ending in 2028. Naples Press reported the same figure in its council coverage: a $45,000 per-member assessment, alongside a $20 million construction loan the club took on to help finance the build.
That cost, combined with the multi-year wait, was enough to change who's actually in the club. According to the same Naples Press reporting, 45 members left over the assessment and the timeline, and 23 residents on the waiting list joined to take their place. The membership itself is capped at 700, so that churn represents roughly six percent of the roster turning over in one cycle, not a rounding error.
The initiation fee for new members has moved during this same window. It stood at $315,000 before rising to $400,000 effective January 1, 2026, with annual dues around $16,200. Further increases have already been floated as the clubhouse nears completion, though nothing beyond that January adjustment has been confirmed. For current members, the assessment schedule matters more day to day than any of this: $45,000 is a fixed number with a fixed due date, already partly paid, regardless of whether the doors open in September or January.
The club's own accounting of where that money goes is specific. Of the total project cost, roughly $76.1 million covers the main building, sitework, the parking structure, kitchen equipment and furniture and fixtures. The remainder is professional services and soft costs: the architect, interior designer, owner's representative, and a full bench of structural, civil, coastal, geotechnical, soil, environmental and parking engineers. The team assembled for this includes Hart Howerton as lead architect, Champalimaud on interiors, Suffolk Construction as general contractor, Humiston & Moore on coastal engineering and Davidson Engineering on civil work, with Cheffy Passidomo handling the legal side and Lehrer Cumming serving as owner's representative. That's not a small local build. It's a full luxury resort development team, assembled for a private club with fewer than 700 members.
The Wall Finished Before the Clubhouse Did
The most granular record of what this project actually involved doesn't come from the brochure. It comes from the hearing itself.
The club's neighbor to the south, Terry Mullen, bought his $31 million home two months before Hurricane Ian hit and became the lone holdout during the approval process, raising concerns about noise, views, traffic, lights, building height and smells. The club spent roughly $2 million in design changes trying to address his objections before the August 2024 hearing, and Council still had to work through them condition by condition. What came out of that back-and-forth is the most concrete, already-built evidence of how this project actually landed on the ground:
- The height variance Council granted allows an 11-foot wall between the club and Mullen's property, well above the city's standard 6-foot limit, though it steps back down to 6 feet past his home.
- The third level's south-facing after-dinner lounge balcony must be fully enclosed rather than open-air.
- The second level's south-facing sunset bar has sliding doors that must close once the space reaches 50 percent occupancy.
- If Code Enforcement confirms three separate noise violations within any 12-month period, the club is required to come back before Council to address them.
- The pool itself was relocated from the original plan, moved from 10 feet off Mullen's property line to 80 feet, and shifted away from the center of the property toward the water.
Council approved the wall waiver on a 5-2 vote, with Mayor Teresa Heitmann and council member Linda Penniman opposed, and approved outdoor dining separately on a 6-1 vote. Mullen, for his part, told Council afterward that he was grateful for the tremendous work city staff and Council put into reviewing the matter, while declining to say whether he'd pursue further action. The club's public statement called the approvals a chance to lock in key entitlements for a building meant to serve members for generations.
That wall is the only piece of this entire $100 million plan that's fully resolved, fully built, and no longer subject to revision. Everything else, the dining rooms, the sunset bar, the beachfront lawn, is still a rendering until it isn't.
What Actually Changes This Season
For members, the honest version of the update is this: the clubhouse itself is still under construction with no confirmed reopening month, the $45,000 assessment has already been paid or is being paid in installments regardless of when the ribbon gets cut, and the wall between the club and its most vocal neighbor is finished, landscaped and legally binding. Temporary on-site arrangements have kept some club functions running during construction, so it's the practical starting point if you're trying to figure out what's actually available to you between now and whatever month the doors finally open.
If you're weighing a decision that touches Port Royal Club eligibility, whether that's understanding what an assessment schedule actually commits you to or how a property's club status factors into ownership, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these details as they change rather than repeating the last press release. Abby Fraga has spent more than two decades in Naples real estate and welcomes the chance to talk through what's actually happening on the ground in Port Royal. Let's Connect.
