"The only thing that would be incompatible and unacceptable would be to build a 20-foot wall, the Berlin Wall times two." That was Naples Vice Mayor Terry Hutchison, mid-hearing, explaining to his fellow council members why a Port Royal neighbor's request for a 20-foot barrier around the reconstructed Port Royal Club wasn't going to happen. The remark came near the end of roughly ten hours of testimony in August 2024, and it tells you more about what's actually been built on Gordon Drive than any rendering the club has released.
Here's the thing residents already sense but rarely see spelled out: the new clubhouse isn't just late. It was shaped, room by room, by a fight with the one neighbor closest to it, and that fight is still visible in how the building will function once it finally opens.
The Fence Fight That Built the Building
The Port Royal Club's original one-story clubhouse, standing since 1959, was destroyed by Hurricane Ian on September 28, 2022. The membership voted to rebuild rather than repair, and Naples City Council unanimously approved the club's conditional-use petition on August 21, 2024, clearing the way for a three-level structure with indoor and outdoor dining, a new pool and deck, and a two-story garage.
That approval didn't come easily. Terry Mullen, whose $31 million beachfront home sits just south of the club property, objected to the new building's height, noise, traffic, lights, and even smells. The club spent $2 million adjusting the plans to address his concerns before the hearing even started, and council layered on more conditions after two days of dueling architects and acoustics experts. The southern-facing balcony on the third-level after-dinner lounge will be fully enclosed. The sliding doors on the second-level sunset bar have to close once the space hits 50 percent occupancy. If Code Enforcement confirms three noise violations within any 12-month span, the club has to go back before council to answer for it.
Council did grant the club an 11-foot wall along the property line, on a 5-2 vote, over the objections of Mayor Teresa Heitmann and council member Linda Penniman. That wall runs 150 feet before dropping to the standard 6-foot height past Mullen's property. Outdoor dining squeaked through on a 6-1 vote, with Hutchison as the lone no. The pool, originally slated for the center of the property, moved 80 feet further from Mullen's lot line than the first draft proposed.
None of this is trivia. It's the actual operating manual for the building members will walk into: where the bar closes its doors, how loud the after-dinner lounge is allowed to get, how many times the club can trip a noise complaint before city council gets involved again. The club that reopens won't just look different from the one Ian took. It will behave differently, by design, because of one dispute with one neighbor.
A Season That Keeps Not Quite Arriving
Here's where the timeline gets interesting, and where a lot of what residents have read doesn't quite line up. The club's own construction brochure lists a "Grand Opening: Summer 2026" against a schedule that had demolition and construction beginning in summer 2024. In practice, groundbreaking itself slipped. A September 2024 report on the council approval quoted the club's own statement about "looking forward to breaking ground in December," meaning the actual start of construction came roughly five to six months after the original schedule called for it.
That early slip has compounded. Reporting through the first half of 2026 has generally described the completion window as "late 2026" rather than the summer 2026 date the club originally set, and at least one more recent update points specifically to a fall 2026 opening, a season later than the club's own brochure promised. Whichever of those windows holds, one fact isn't in dispute: as of this month, the clubhouse the brochure said would be open by now, isn't.
That matters because of when club season actually runs. The Port Royal Club's calendar traditionally starts in mid-August and runs through mid-July, which means the season that just opened this month is the fourth consecutive club season to begin with the beachfront clubhouse still unfinished, counting each mid-August start since the storm took the original building in September 2022. If the fall 2026 window holds, members will spend the opening months of this season, the one that just started, still waiting for the building to finish. That's a long stretch for a neighborhood's social anchor to sit as a construction site, longer than most of the coverage of the rebuild has acknowledged directly.
What $45,000 Actually Bought
The rebuild's price tag runs to roughly $100 million, financed partly through a $20 million construction loan and partly through direct member assessments. The club billed members $45,000 apiece on August 1, 2024. That single bill did something the renderings never show: it thinned the roster.
Forty-five members left rather than pay it and wait out the construction. Twenty-three residents on the waiting list stepped in to take their place, a net loss of 22 members. In an August 9, 2024 letter, Club President Nancy Carlson told the remaining membership that 85 percent of those who resigned were over age 70, leaving 622 members against a hard cap of 700.
Read that carefully and it says something the dollar figure alone doesn't. The people who left weren't priced out in the ordinary sense. Most were older members for whom a multi-year wait for a building, on top of a five-figure bill, simply wasn't worth it at this stage of life. The people who replaced them came off a waiting list that, even mid-rebuild, still had takers. That's a demographic filter running quietly underneath a construction project, and it means the club that reopens will have a membership that skews at least a little younger and a little more patient than the one that closed after Ian.
Where the Neighborhood Actually Eats This Season
None of this changes what residents do on a Tuesday night. With the clubhouse still under construction, the everyday rhythm of eating and provisioning in Port Royal has shifted a few blocks north into downtown Naples, largely unremarked because it's simply become normal.
For groceries and prepared food, Wynn's Market on 9th Street North, a family-owned operation that's served Naples since 1938, has become the default stop for residents who'd otherwise have picked up dinner at the club. For sit-down meals, the rotation tends to run through a small set of names:
- Sails Restaurant, just north of Port Royal off 5th Avenue, for coastal cuisine and a wine list deep enough to make the wait feel less like a wait
- Osteria Tulia and its sibling Bar Tulia, for rustic Italian and upscale pizza in the heart of downtown
- Chop's City Grill, for dry-aged steaks when the occasion calls for something heavier
- Truluck's, for the seafood towers the club's own dining room used to handle
None of this is a hardship. Downtown Naples is a short drive from Gordon Drive, and Cutlass Cove Beach, the residents-only stretch of sand on Gulf Shore Boulevard, has been open the entire time, construction or not. But it's worth naming plainly rather than glossing over: for going on four years, the neighborhood's daily social life has run on a workaround, and that workaround has quietly become the norm rather than the exception.
The Building Everyone Will Walk Into
Put the pieces together and the story isn't really about a construction delay. It's about a neighborhood whose social center has been rebuilt, twice over, once by the physical construction and once by the four-year absence itself. The clubhouse that eventually opens, whenever the season actually arrives, will carry a fence built to satisfy one neighbor, a membership roster reshaped by who could afford to wait, and a set of downtown habits that four years of Tuesday nights have already made permanent. Whatever the ribbon-cutting looks like, the neighborhood that walks through the new doors won't be quite the one that walked out of the old ones in September 2022.
If you're a Port Royal owner curious about how a wait this long, and a rebuild this specific, tends to show up in what a property is actually worth once the dust settles, Donna Tidwell has spent decades watching how neighborhood-level change plays out in Naples and the Laurel Highlands alike. Reach out anytime you want to talk through what's changing next door, or request a free home valuation when you're ready to see where things stand.
