For years, if you lived anywhere between Doctors Pass and Fifth Avenue South, the story of your neighborhood was the same story everyone else was telling: the old Naples Beach Hotel site was a construction zone, and you planned your beach walks and dinner reservations around fencing, dust and a completion date that kept moving. That story is no longer true, or at least not true in the way most people still assume it is. The resort side of the equation is largely finished. The construction has not gone away. It moved next door, to Lowdermilk Park itself, and it's worth knowing exactly where the work is now so you're not avoiding a beach club that's already open or wandering into a playground that isn't.
What's Already Open At Naples Beach Club
Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort opened to the public on November 17, 2025, and the pieces that matter most for a Coquina Sands resident's evening routine have been running since then. HB's, the longtime beachfront restaurant that generations of Naples residents grew up eating at, came back with a new dining room and the same panoramic Gulf view. Sunset Bar reopened alongside it, now with a Latin-leaning small-plates menu and the kind of golden-hour crowd it always drew. The resort's flagship, The Merchant Room, is led by chef Gavin Kaysen, a two-time James Beard Award winner running his first restaurant outside the Midwest, serving a French-inflected menu built around Gulf ingredients.
Market Square, the resort's retail and dining hub near the entrance, picked up another piece this year when Naples Trading Company opened its doors in the first months of 2026, a coffee shop carrying sundries, beer, wine and gifts. And in March 2026, the resort's wellness anchor, a two-level, 30,000-square-foot spa called The Sanctuary, opened with a rooftop lap pool and a fitness program built around trainer Harley Pasternak's programming.
None of that is under construction anymore. If you've been steering clear of that stretch of Gulf Shore Boulevard on the assumption that it's still a hard-hat site, you've been skipping restaurants that have been fully open for the better part of a year.
What's Still Landing This Year
The resort isn't finished, but what's left is a specific, shorter list rather than the whole property. The Wager, a sports-focused gastropub built around Four Seasons' first regulation four-lane bowling alley, and The Picture House, a 22-seat private cinema, are both still on the resort's calendar for this year, along with FINS Kids Club. The bigger piece is The Gardens, a Tom Fazio-designed 18-hole course built in partnership with Discovery Land Company, which the resort has slated for a fall debut.
Here's the practical version of that timeline:
| Naples Beach Club amenity | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|
| HB's (beachfront restaurant) | Open since November 2025 |
| Sunset Bar | Open since November 2025 |
| The Merchant Room (Chef Gavin Kaysen) | Open since November 2025 |
| Naples Trading Co. (Market Square café) | Opened early 2026 |
| The Sanctuary (spa and wellness) | Opened March 2026 |
| The Wager (gastropub and bowling) | Slated for 2026 |
| The Picture House (cinema) | Slated for 2026 |
| The Gardens (Tom Fazio golf course) | Slated for fall 2026 |
That's the resort's construction footprint shrinking to golf-adjacent buildings and a handful of entertainment venues, not the beachfront the neighborhood actually walks past.
The Work That Moved To Lowdermilk
While the resort's guest-facing pieces have been checking off, the City of Naples has been quietly moving its own project forward a few hundred yards north, at Lowdermilk Park's address on Gulf Shore Boulevard North. In June 2026, the Naples City Council took up a $699,787 agreement with Playmore West Inc. to design and install a new playground and covered gazebo on the park's north side, replacing the playground that Hurricane Ian destroyed back in 2022. That's the disruption a lot of residents haven't clocked yet, because the storm damage is old news and the rebuild is new news.
A few specifics worth knowing before you plan a walk through:
- The project replaces the north-side playground lost to Hurricane Ian in 2022, nearly four years after the storm.
- Funding combines two previously approved park enhancement allocations with a $250,000 donation from the Nommensen family.
- The gazebo component was originally part of a 2025 park improvement plan but got postponed when construction bids came in over budget, which is part of why this has taken this long to reach a vote.
- The proposal also calls for updating the city's 2025-26 budget to draw an additional $250,000 from the Beach Fund to help close the gap.
None of that shows up if you're only tracking the resort news, because it's a separate city project with its own funding stack and its own contractor. But it's the reason the north end of Lowdermilk is going to look different by the time the weather cools, and it's the reason your gazebo reservation options might be more limited on that side of the park in the interim.
Planning Around Two Projects Instead Of One
The practical takeaway for anyone who lives in Coquina Sands is that the neighborhood's daily-life map has two active projects on it right now instead of one, and they're not on the same timeline. The resort side is mostly a place to eat and relax again. HB's, Sunset Bar and The Merchant Room are open for dinner tonight. The Sanctuary is open for a morning workout. The park side is where the actual construction noise is going to be this fall, concentrated on the north end near the volleyball courts rather than the whole property.
Lowdermilk's south gazebo, near the park entrance, and the concession stand at the beach side of the park are unaffected by the playground work and remain the more reliable option if you're planning a picnic or a reservation in the coming months. The duck pond and walking paths through the middle of the park aren't part of this project either. If you've been avoiding the whole park because you assumed it was closed for construction, that's worth revisiting, since only the north playground area is actually affected.
Why This Is Worth Tracking
Coquina Sands sits close enough to both projects that neither one is background noise. The neighborhood's stretch of Gulf Shore Boulevard North runs directly between the resort and the park, and residents here are more likely than most to walk past both in the same afternoon. Knowing which construction zone is actually active, and which one has quietly turned back into a place to eat dinner or watch a sunset, is the difference between planning your week around outdated information and actually using what's in front of you.
It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that only becomes obvious once you've lived here long enough to notice when a familiar stretch of road stops matching the story you've been telling yourself about it.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Naples is actually worth once you factor in what's opening, what's still under construction and what it means for daily life here, The Beachfront Team tracks these building-level and neighborhood-level changes as part of how we advise clients on Naples' beachfront communities. Experience the Beachfront Difference. Schedule a confidential consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's changing on your stretch of the coast.
