The Naples Beach Club, a Four Seasons Resort unveils transformation
The Naples Beach Club, a Four Seasons Resort, has been reimagined, with the masterplan, architecture and landscape design led by Hart Howerton and interiors envisioned by Champalimaud design.
The transformation, preserving the Florida property’s historic role as a gathering place while reimagining it for the future, comes after The Athens Group and BDT & MSD Partners took stewardship of the 125-acre property in 2021, committing to preserve its legacy of hospitality while reintroducing it as a world-class Four Seasons resort and residential community.
The new design embraces the resorts layered history as a part of Naples, an area long-defined by one- and two-story cottages featuring clapboard and board-and-batten siding, broad screened porches and deep roof overhangs suited to the coastal climate.
While the original Beach Club grew to include a five and seven-storey hotel in its later decades, the bar, awnings and beachfront remained its cultural anchor. As such, Hart Howerton envisioned the property as a collection of buildings, echoing the way the site developed over generations rather than as a single monolithic resort, ensuring continuity with the past while opening the property to new uses and experiences.
Materials across the property were chosen to balance character with resilience. The hotel’s structural core is cast-in-place concrete, engineered to withstand coastal conditions, while stucco is applied to concrete blockwork and detailed to mimic traditional clapboard siding, preserving a sense of place.
Larger buildings are crowned with standing seam metal roofs, while low-rise beachfront structures are capped in cedar shake. Stucco, hand-pressed with shells, anchors the architecture to the white sands of the Gulf, while the property’s signature striped awnings, colour-matched to originals, extend its historic details into the present.
Outside, a thousand feet of beachfront is framed as a garden of pools, lawns and gathering spaces oriented to the Gulf, reinforced with restorative dune plantings of sea oats, sea grasses and sea grapes whose root systems stabilise the shoreline. A central pedestrian walkway, the ‘coconut connector’, threads inland to link the beachfront with the golf course and Market Square, knitting the campus together across Gulf Shore Boulevard North.
On the east side of the property, over 100 acres of open space have been permanently preserved through a conservation easement, ensuring the golf course remains a defining green expanse in perpetuity.
Market Square anchors the inland edge with restaurants, wellness and event spaces that extend the Beach Club’s social tradition. The program includes a restaurant, The Wager, as well as a multi-level spa and fitness centre, plunge pools and versatile event venues. Together, Market Square and the beachfront create a ‘dumbbell’ plan, tied by the coconut connector, that organizes the property around its twin anchors: Gulf and golf.
Beyond the hotel, 141 Four Seasons Private Residences are designed as ‘homes in the sky’. The beach-facing residences average more than 5,600ft2, and the golf course-facing residences average around 4,330ft2. These residences feature expansive outdoor terraces 13-15ft deep and layouts designed to accommodate multi-generational living.
Two typologies distinguish the offering: penthouse residences with Gulf views, private pools and landscaped terraces, and beach houses at the ground floor, elevated yet connected directly to the sand by private staircases. Residents enjoy full access to the hotel’s amenities, complemented by their own pools, spa and fitness areas, and dining spaces.
