Naples Beach Club nears opening as $1 billion project nears completion

Nearly four years after buying the former Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club, the developers behind the Naples Beach Club expect to open the first phase of the 125-acre resort and residential property later this year.

Jay Newman, COO of the Phoenix developer behind the project, The Athens Group, spoke at the ULI Florida Summit in early June about the more than $1 billion renovation project, saying the plan is for the property to open in the fall.

“Actually,” Newman says, “the first phase is the largest phase. The entire project is 1.8 million square feet and the first phase is about 1.2 million square feet.”

The first phase includes a 220-room Four Seasons Hotel; three beachside residential buildings totaling 58 units; HB’s and The Sunset Beach Bar; and Building E, which will be made up of 12 residences and 16 guestrooms.

Also opening will be the market square conference center and clubhouse.

Athens has been working on the project since it and New York-based MSD Partners paid $362.3 million for the site in October 2021. The idea, from the start, was that when the resort and residential beachfront development was completed, it would be one of the premiere destinations on the state’s West Coast.

Its approach seems to be working.

As the property gets ready to open, 95% of the 58 beachside units have been sold. Those units average about 5,000 square feet and, Newman says, are “by and large in the $20 million price range.”

Preservation conversation

There is one main feature of the property not immediately set to open: the golf course.

Newman, in answers to follow up questions via email, says that delay is because a portion of the course was used to “facilitate the construction” on the project. Work is expected to begin soon, with the course to be ready in fall of next year.

Courtesy image

The golf course, one of the foundations of the original club, turns out to have been an integral part of the decision that led to Athens’ purchasing the property.

As Newman tells it, before it and MSD bought the then Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club, the Watkins family, which had owned the club for decades, was torn about letting it go. They sought to preserve as much of the family legacy as possible. 

One of the concerns the family had was the future of the golf course, which makes up 84% of the property.

The hotel, meanwhile, according to a history on the former resort’s website, was built two blocks from the Naples fishing pier and about two miles south from where it now stands. It was named The Naples Hotel.

Like many vacation spots then and now it catered to Midwestern travelers looking to escape winter. These were the early snowbirds who got to Naples in December and did not go home again until spring.

In 1929, the first 18-hole golf course in the area was built by Allen Joslin and his wife Lois, an heiress to the Jergens lotion fortune. Allen Joslin bought beachfront property next to the course in order to build a clubhouse for the golfers and others to use and called it The Beach Club.

That became the first building in what would one day be The Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club.

Henry Watkins Sr. bought The Naples Hotel as well as The Beach Club and golf course in 1946.

Watkins, with the deed to both properties, set out to build a vacation destination spanning from the golf course to the gulf, the property where the resorts sits on today.

Newman, at the ULI event, said other bidders they were competing with viewed the golf course as “incredible real estate.” The thinking from those other entities was, he says, “I can put up 150 houses and it will be another great neighborhood.”

His group took the opposite approach.

“We said, ‘Where do you find these days a hotel you can put on the beach — powder white sand (for) 1,000 feet — with a golf course?’ So, we saw the golf course as a real asset and not something we should develop.

“And that really led to the Watkins working with us on this.”

Nice views

Athens eventually designated the golf course — about 104 acres — as open space and followed that up by setting up a conservation easement with the North American Land Trust and the city of Naples. Newman says this allows that portion of the land to remain an open and recreation space in perpetuity.

The idea for that is a part of the company’s strategy which, Newman says, includes finding locations and then “trying to be kind of harmonious with the environment.”

Speaking of nature, during the time since the redevelopment began, the area has seen three major hurricanes hit. But those storms affected the project in a way most people wouldn’t expect.

Newman says in the follow-up email that the “project was minimally impacted” by the storms. Instead, he says given where the hotel and the residences were to be constructed, the buildings had to be elevated based on FEMA requirements.

That, he says in a spin worthy of one whose job it is to promote real estate holdings, “enhances the views of the gulf and its dramatic sunsets.”