On November 17, 2025, more than 200 people crowded onto the beachfront deck as HB's and Sunset Bar opened to the public for the first time since the old Naples Beach Hotel closed its doors four years earlier. Neighbors could walk back onto that stretch of Gulf-facing sand where generations had gathered for sunset drinks and standing tee times. It was, by any measure, the moment the project had been building toward.
It was not, however, the moment that actually changed daily life in Coquina Sands. That moment is happening now, this fall, and it has almost nothing to do with the restaurants.
If you tried to walk or bike down Gulf Shore Boulevard North last winter, you were navigating a work zone. The resort had opened. The street underneath it had not caught up. According to a bulletin from the Gulf Shore Association of Condominiums, Gulf Shore Boulevard North would only fully reopen once the City of Naples finished its water line work along the boulevard and completed a north outfall pump station at 8th Avenue North. Only after that municipal work wrapped would the corridor get its new landscaped medians, paver sidewalks, upgraded crosswalks with pedestrian warning lights, and bike lanes running both directions.
That is the part worth sitting with. The private side of this project, a $1 billion-plus hospitality and residential build, finished and opened to the public before the public infrastructure underneath it did. Usually it runs the other way: the road gets rebuilt, then the ribbon gets cut. Here, residents got the restaurant before they got their sidewalk back.
Why the Golf Course Waited for Fall
The other piece landing this season is The Gardens, the Tom Fazio-designed 18-hole course being built across roughly 100 acres of the property, Old Naples' first on-site golf course. Multiple accounts of the project, including reporting in Architect Magazine and coverage from Gulfshore Life, place its debut in fall 2026, and the GSAC bulletin explains why the timing lands exactly here rather than earlier in the summer: the course's completion has been paced by a dedicated construction access road, built specifically so that development traffic never had to route through Coquina Sands.
That detail says something about how this project was actually built, not just how it was marketed. For four years, a neighborhood a few hundred feet from a $1 billion construction site kept its quiet streets because someone engineered a separate road just to keep the trucks out. The golf course opening this fall isn't only a new amenity. It's the signal that the access road has finished its job and construction traffic on that route is done.
What's Actually Landing at Market Square
The golf course and the boulevard are the two changes that touch the street itself. The rest of what's arriving this season touches what's waiting at the other end of the walk.
| What | What it is | Where things stood in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| The Gardens | Tom Fazio's 18-hole course, ~100 acres | Slated for fall 2026, timed to the dedicated construction access road |
| Gulf Shore Blvd North | New medians, paver sidewalks, signal crosswalks, bike lanes both sides | Awaiting the city's waterline and 8th Ave North pump station completion |
| The Wager | Sports gastropub with a four-lane bowling alley and game room | Previewed in April 2026, per regional restaurant tracking |
| Naples Trading Co. | Grab-and-go café and market in Market Square | Targeted for early 2026 rollout alongside the hotel's phased openings |
| Sanctuary Spa | Two-level, 30,000-square-foot spa with 13 treatment rooms | Offered in-room treatments at launch while the full space finished construction |
HB's and Sunset Bar have been running since opening night, joined by The Merchant Room, the flagship restaurant from two-time James Beard Award winner Chef Gavin Kaysen. The rest of Market Square has been filling in behind them on its own schedule, and that's a distinction worth keeping straight if you've been reading the resort's opening as a single event. It wasn't one ribbon cutting. It was the start of a rollout that is only now reaching the pieces residents actually pass on a daily walk.
Reading the Corridor If You Walk or Ride It
None of this changes what Coquina Sands has always been, a quiet stretch of Gulf-front streets between downtown and the Moorings, built for beach cruisers more than car traffic. What it changes is how that stretch connects to everything around it.
Gulf Shore Boulevard North has functionally been the neighborhood's spine and its construction zone at the same time for the better part of two years. Once the city's waterline and pump station work clears, the boulevard's new bike lanes will run the full corridor rather than stopping at the edges of the work zone. If you've ridden it recently and noticed new green bike-lane panels at the intersections of Gulf Shore Boulevard North and Park Shore Drive, or at Harbour Drive where it crosses both Gulf Shore Boulevard and Crayton Road, that's the City of Naples' own cycling infrastructure work already showing up at the seams where Coquina Sands meets Park Shore.
Crayton Road remains the useful inland alternative if you'd rather skip the beachfront corridor altogether. It runs parallel, a few blocks in, and gets you from Midtown to downtown past Venetian Village and Lowdermilk Park without touching Gulf Shore Boulevard at all, useful to know on the days the boulevard's construction crews are still working the final stretch.
The Actual Story This Fall
The easy version of this story is "the Four Seasons finished opening." That version was true in November 2025 and it's still technically true now, but it treats the resort as the whole neighborhood, which it isn't. The version that actually matters if you live here is that the public street in front of the private resort took longer to finish than the resort did, and this fall is when that gap closes. The golf course opening isn't just a new amenity next door. It's confirmation that the construction access road built to protect Coquina Sands from four years of truck traffic has finally finished the job it was built for. The boulevard reopening isn't cosmetic either. It's the first time since this project broke ground that residents get their sidewalk, their crosswalks, and their bike lanes back without a work zone in the middle of them.
That's worth knowing whether you golf, whether you eat at HB's, or whether you've simply been rerouting your evening walk for two years and wondering when that would stop.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own property in Coquina Sands, whether you're watching values shift as the last pieces of this project land or you're simply curious how a building-level change like this tends to ripple through a market, The Beachfront Team has been tracking Naples' beachfront neighborhoods long enough to read what these shifts actually mean, street by street. Experience the Beachfront Difference. Schedule a confidential consultation whenever you're ready to talk it through.
