The New Coquina Sands Village Square: A Resident's Guide To Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort

The ascending driveway off Gulf Shore Boulevard North rises just enough to slow you down before the porte-cochère, and the shellcrete foundation is the first thing you notice on foot. It is a deliberate quote of the wave-shaped sign that stood at 851 Gulf Shore for seventy-five years, and it is doing quiet work: telling long-time Coquina Sands residents that the address they walked past for decades has not been replaced so much as re-cast.

What sits behind that entry now is not really a hotel in the old sense. The 125-acre Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort, opened with a soft debut in late 2025 and has been staging its venues in ever since. The useful way to think about it, if you live within a mile of the property, is not as a resort to visit but as a semi-public block that has been slotted into the southern edge of your neighborhood, with a calendar of openings that runs through the end of 2026.

The site stopped being a hotel and started being a village square

The former Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club was a single-purpose destination for seventy-five years. The Watkins family sold the property in October 2021 for $362.28 million to The Athens Group, which is developing it with BDT & MSD Partners; demolition followed in 2022. The rebuild kept 1,000 feet of beachfront and 125 acres of footprint, but the program is fundamentally different: 220 rooms, 57 suites, 153 residences, and a central mixed-use spine called Market Square that is explicitly designed for locals to walk into.

That design intent is not marketing gloss. The Naples City Council unanimously approved outdoor seating on June 18, 2025 for six separate food and beverage venues at 801, 802, and 811 Gulf Shore Boulevard North: The Merchant Room, HB's on the Gulf, Sunset Bar, The Shed, The Wager, and Naples Trading Co. That is a denser cluster of permitted alfresco dining than existed on the entire block a decade ago, and the venues are not stacked in a single lobby. They are distributed across the resort's east and west parcels so that Market Square functions like a small commercial district rather than a hotel amenity.

What works right now, and how to walk in

The venues open today are not on a uniform reservation model. Treating them as one system is how residents end up frustrated at the door.

• HB's on the Gulf. Revived on its original footprint with an expanded deck and the reissued blue-and-green striped awning. Reservations are recommended. This is the room that fills first at sunset. Named for Henry B. Watkins, the founder of the original hotel.
• Sunset Bar. First-come, first-served. Tropical cocktails, Latin-inspired bites, ceviche and coastal tacos. The golden-hour walk-in play, and the venue most likely to reward you for showing up in July when the room is calibrated to residents.
• The Merchant Room. New American brasserie in the hotel lobby with a veranda over the pool and the Gulf. Reservations effectively required. Guided by two-time James Beard winner Chef Gavin Kaysen, the founder of Minneapolis-based Soigné Hospitality Group behind Spoon and Stable. His first restaurant outside Minnesota, and the most consequential single addition to the Naples fine-dining tier this year.
• Naples Trading Company. Grab-and-go in Market Square. Coffee, artisan sandwiches, picnic supplies. This is the practical daily-use door, and the one most residents underuse.
• Sanctuary Spa. 30,000 square feet across two levels, with a thermal circuit and a rooftop two-lane lap pool that came online in mid-December 2025. Fitness facility designed by Harley Pasternak.

The reservation posture matters because HB's and The Merchant Room will absorb the visible demand this winter. Sunset Bar and Naples Trading Company are how you use the property on a Tuesday.

The Gavin Kaysen bet is the piece to watch

The Merchant Room is the single opening most likely to reshape where Naples eats in 2026. Chef Kaysen is a two-time James Beard Award winner and the founder of Soigné Hospitality Group, whose Minneapolis roster includes Spoon and Stable, Demi, and Mara at the Four Seasons Hotel Minneapolis. He describes the Naples venture as his first venture outside the Midwest.

That matters for a specific local reason. Coquina Sands residents have long had to leave the neighborhood for chef-driven fine dining, generally down to Fifth Avenue South or Third Street South. The Merchant Room puts a lobby-level dining room with in-house dry-aged steaks and house-made pasta three minutes' walk from Gulf Shore Boulevard condos. The reservation math on Fifth Avenue is going to feel that pull by high season.

"Naples Beach Club is our modern expression of the cherished traditions and style of Naples." — Diego Angarita, Resort General Manager

Read that as an operating instruction rather than a slogan. The property is being managed as a neighborhood asset for residents to use, not only as a hotel to book.

The 2026 rollout calendar every resident should keep

Not everything is open. The property was designed to stage in through the end of 2026, and the sequence matters if you are planning a fall visit from family or trying to book a screening room for a small event.

1. Fin's Club & Teen Centre — Q1 2026. Programming for ages 4 to 12 just off Market Square, plus a teen space with movies and video games.
2. The Picture House — Fall 2026. A plush private screening room. Ourisman Travel's early reporting listed Q1, but the Four Seasons amenities page has since updated to fall. Plan around the later date.
3. The Wager — October 2026. A sports pub anchoring Market Square, with a regulation four-lane bowling alley and a game lounge. This is the room designed for casual weeknight walk-ins with kids or grandkids.
4. The Gardens — Fall 2026. The 18-hole Tom Fazio–designed course, the successor to the original Naples Beach Hotel course. Athens Group recorded a conservation easement with the North American Land Trust preserving more than 104 acres of recreation and open space, which is why the course footprint reads the way it always did from Crayton Road.

By the first weekend of December 2026, in other words, the property will finally be operating at full program: dining spine, entertainment spine, kids' spine, and golf spine. Right now it is operating at roughly two-thirds.

The pieces most residents miss

Three items in the amenity stack are underused because they are not obvious from the street.

The Racquet Club operates six Har-Tru clay courts with a year-round program that blends instruction, fitness, and social play. For anyone in Coquina Sands who has been driving to Cambier or Pelican Bay for clay, that is a materially shorter trip.

The Hinckley Picnic Boat excursions run out of the resort as 34-foot charters, with WaveRunner tours pushing further south toward Marco Island and the Ten Thousand Islands. This is a rare charter setup from a Gulf Shore address rather than a bay marina, and the daily-use value for a resident who does not own a boat is genuinely different from what the old hotel offered.

Free bikes are available for guests. The relevant point for residents is not the loan itself; it is that the resort has re-oriented its Gulf Shore frontage toward walking and cycling traffic, which reads on the sidewalk as a calmer block than the old hotel service loop.

What the Coquina Sands block feels like from here

The change on the ground is subtle in a way the renderings did not predict. The blue-green stripe on HB's awning, the haint-blue porte-cochère ceilings, the Chippendale-style rail motifs on the guest rooms all read as Old Naples vernacular rather than resort iconography. The redevelopment kept the shellcrete wall along the property edge intentionally frangible, engineered to wash through safely during storms. Those design choices, together, are why the property already reads to long-time residents as an extension of the neighborhood rather than an intrusion into it.

The second phase reinforces that read. The city has granted final approval for 83 additional residences across four buildings, and the wider pipeline tracker at Markets of Tomorrow confirms Naples Beach Club as delivered in December 2025 with Olana Naples under construction farther up Gulf Shore Boulevard. The block is not finished. It is on a two-year glide path.

The practical implication for anyone who lives here: the window between now and October 2026 is the last stretch during which Sunset Bar is a reliable walk-in, HB's still has late-notice reservations mid-week, and Naples Trading Company operates as your quiet coffee stop rather than the pass-through it will become when The Wager and the golf course open. Use the room while the room is still calibrated to you.

If you are weighing what this rollout means for your block on Gulf Shore Boulevard, Crayton Road, or the bay side of Coquina Sands, Michael Dekic is available to walk the neighborhood with you and talk through how the property line reads from each address. Let's connect and start your Naples home search.