For the better part of four years, walking the west side of Gulf Shore Boulevard North after dinner meant picking a route around cones, bypass signage, and a construction fence that ran for blocks. That fence came down last November. What's replaced it, and what hasn't fully replaced it yet, is worth knowing precisely, because the story most Coquina Sands residents are still carrying in their heads is the November 2025 opening-week version. That version is already out of date twice over.
Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort, opened to guests on November 17, 2025, on the 125-acre site of the old Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club. The headline facts from that week traveled fast: 1,000 feet of Gulf shoreline, 220 total accommodations including 57 suites, the return of HB's and Sunset Bar. What didn't travel as well is that a resort this size doesn't open once. It opens in installments, and the installment schedule matters more to someone who lives four blocks away than it does to a guest booking a week in February.
The boulevard was the actual construction project
It's easy to assume the four years of detours and access roads were entirely about the resort. They weren't. According to the Gulf Shore Association of Condominiums, the timing of the Gardens golf course, the new 18-hole Tom Fazio design on the property, was deliberately tied to a private construction access road built specifically to keep development traffic off Coquina Sands' own streets. The neighborhood's quiet was the trade-off the whole time, not a side effect of it.
That trade paid out this year. With the city's water line along Gulf Shore Boulevard North and the north outfall pump station on 8th Avenue North finished, the boulevard reopened in its completed form, not the temporary bypass version residents had been using. The upgrades are specific enough to notice on a Tuesday evening walk:
- Landscaped medians down the center of the boulevard
- Paver sidewalks replacing the old poured concrete
- A pedestrian warning light system at crosswalks that didn't have one before
- Bike lanes on both sides of the road, where before there was a shoulder at best
- New shade trees along Gulf Shore Boulevard North and Oleander Drive
None of that is resort amenity. It's public infrastructure that happened to get rebuilt because a billion-dollar neighbor needed the city to finish its own utility work first. The sidewalk under your feet on an evening walk to the beach is a direct result of a private development's construction sequencing, whether or not you ever set foot inside the resort.
What's actually open this week, not what was open in November
The dining lineup announced at opening was accurate for opening week. It isn't fully accurate for September 2026, because HB's spent all of August closed for what the resort is calling refinements and only reopened this month. That's the kind of detail that doesn't survive in a blog post written last winter, and it's exactly the kind of detail a neighbor needs before deciding where to walk for dinner tonight.
Here's the current state of things, as of this month:
| Venue | Status this month | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| HB's | Open, reopened in September after an August closure | Seafood and raw bar, reservations recommended in season |
| Sunset Bar | Open nightly | Walk-in only, no reservations, live music Friday through Sunday evenings |
| The Merchant Room | Open | Chef Gavin Kaysen's brasserie, reservations required |
| Naples Trading Co. | Open | Coffee and grab-and-go, earliest food option on the property |
| The Wager | Not yet open | Sports gastropub and bowling, targeted for later this year |
| The Gardens golf course | Not yet open | Tom Fazio design, targeted for fall 2026 |
| Picture House cinema | Not yet open | 22-seat theater, no confirmed date yet |
The three venues that are open share one detail worth underlining: none of them require a room key. HB's, Sunset Bar, and The Merchant Room are all open to the public. You don't book a stay to eat at any of them. Valet runs about $15 with restaurant validation, which is a small price for what used to require a drive to Third Street South or the Naples Pier for a comparable sunset view.
Sunset Bar takes no reservations. You show up, and if there's a wait, you wait on the sand, not in a line.
That's not a minor operational note. It changes what "checking the sunset" means for someone who lives on this stretch of coast. The nightly ritual involves the blowing of a conch shell at golden hour, a detail carried over from the resort's own framing of the moment as the neighborhood's social hour rather than a hotel amenity reserved for guests.
The part that's still fenced off
The golf course is the clearest marker of how much is still in progress. Grassing on the Fazio design started in spring 2026 and was expected to run through the fall, which lines up with the "fall 2026" opening window multiple sources have converged on. That means the course residents can currently see from the boulevard is turf in progress, not a playable amenity, and won't be for at least another month or two from today.
The Wager, the sports gastropub with the four-lane bowling alley, was targeted for the third quarter of this year and hasn't opened as of this writing. The Picture House, the 22-seat cinema, has no firm date attached to it in anything published so far. Market Square, the retail and dining hub meant to tie all of this together, is still assembling itself piece by piece rather than arriving as a finished district.
Why the sequencing is the actual story
The easy version of this story is "the resort next door reopened, go enjoy it." The more useful version, if you actually live on these streets, is that the reopening isn't a single event you either caught or missed. It's a rolling sequence that's still running, and the gap between what opened in November 2025 and what's open in September 2026 is not small. A restaurant that closed for a full month and just came back. A boulevard that only reached its finished state this year, after infrastructure work the resort's own construction timeline was built around. A golf course still growing in.
For a Coquina Sands resident, that means the practical question isn't "is the Naples Beach Club open." It's "what, specifically, is open this week, and is it worth the walk." Right now, the answer is: three restaurants that don't require a hotel key, a nightly sunset ritual you can walk to instead of drive to, and a boulevard finally built for the walk itself. The golf course, the bowling alley, and the cinema are still a season or two out. Anyone telling you the full property is open and running is describing the brochure, not the block.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a Coquina Sands address you already own, or you're curious how a neighborhood this close to a billion-dollar redevelopment tends to hold its value over a build-out this long, that's a conversation worth having directly. Anthony Caraballo works this stretch of coast daily and can walk you through what the next phase of the Naples Beach Club build-out is likely to mean for the immediate neighborhood, not just the resort itself.
