Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort Review: The Gulf Coast’s Finest, Honestly Assessed
Naples Beach Club opened on November 17, 2025, on 1,000 feet of white sand beach in Old Naples — the southernmost section of Florida’s Gulf Coast that the term luxury has historically called home, in a city where the per-capita wealth levels rival Palm Beach and the specific character of the community — quieter, more residential, more genuinely local than Miami’s international energy — has been shaped by generations of visitors who came from the Midwest and stayed.
The property is built on the site of the Naples Beach Hotel and Golf Club, which the Watkins family operated from 1946 until its closure in 2021 to make way for the redevelopment. HB’s, the beloved beachfront restaurant named for patriarch Henry B. Watkins, Sr., returns in a new building at the waterline. The Sunset Bar, where Naples has been watching the Gulf light change since the original hotel’s earliest years, returns in its original footprint. The community came back to the opening, and the opening came back to the community, in a way that the standard luxury hotel launch rarely achieves.
This is the first Four Seasons on Florida’s Gulf Coast and the sixth Four Seasons property in Florida overall — joining properties in Surfside, Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, and Lanai (which is technically Hawaii but operates within the Florida portfolio’s commercial context). At the Gulf Coast level, it is the finest luxury resort the region has ever had and the property that brings Naples into direct competition with Palm Beach and Miami as a destination for the traveller for whom the finest available is the starting point rather than the aspiration.
The Setting and the Opening Caveat
One hundred and twenty-five acres on Gulf Shore Boulevard in Old Naples. One thousand feet of white sand Gulf beach — west-facing, meaning the sunset arrives directly over the water every evening in the configuration that the Gulf Coast’s geography provides and the Atlantic coast’s cannot. The Tom Fazio 18-hole golf course is under construction and is scheduled to open in 2026. Some amenities — the Market Square entertainment complex including the sports bar, bowling alley, and cinema — are in temporary locations or forthcoming. The hotel, pools, beach, spa, and restaurants are fully operational.
This caveat is worth naming clearly for a property in its opening year: Naples Beach Club is the finest resort on the Gulf Coast in its current state, and it is a resort whose full infrastructure is not yet complete. Guests booking in 2025 and 2026 while the golf course and Market Square finalise will have a different experience from guests arriving in 2027 when the full 125-acre vision is realised. The beach, the rooms, the Merchant Room, the spa, and the Gulf sunsets from HB’s and the Sunset Bar are fully available and fully the point.
The Rooms
Two hundred and twenty guest accommodations including fifty-seven suites — a ratio of suites to standard rooms that reflects the Four Seasons’ commitment to providing genuine upgrade pathways rather than nominal ones. The interiors by Champalimaud Design draw from the Gulf Coast’s light and texture: bleached Pecky cypress ceilings, a native Florida material found in historic Old Florida homes, warm stone, neutral palettes punctuated by the botanical and aquatic motifs of the surrounding coastal landscape. The high-ceilinged rooms have the residential quality that the Four Seasons brand’s finest properties produce — the sense that the room was designed for living in rather than for occupying briefly between beach visits. Almost every room offers a Gulf view. Private terraces with Gulf-facing furniture make the room’s outdoor space as usable as the indoor space on the warm, low-humidity evenings that the Gulf Coast provides from October through April.
The Merchant Room
Gavin Kaysen is a two-time James Beard Award-winning chef whose Minneapolis restaurant Spoon and Stable is among the most acclaimed in the American Midwest. The Merchant Room at Naples Beach Club applies his French-inflected technique to Gulf Coast sourcing — local seafood, Florida produce, ingredients that the proximity to the Gulf and the agricultural landscape of Southwest Florida make available at a freshness the menu honours without obscuring. The dining room mural by New York artist Dean Barger — a floor-to-ceiling Florida flora and fauna composition visible above the bar — establishes the room’s atmosphere before the first plate arrives. For Naples, this is a kitchen and a dining room of a quality the city’s restaurant scene has not previously contained. It is the primary reason guests arriving from across the United States are booking this property specifically.
HB’s and the Sunset Bar
HB’s — Old Naples’ only true beachfront restaurant, rebuilt in its original footprint and named for Henry B. Watkins, Sr., the hotel’s founder — is where the Four Seasons’ formal ambition and the community’s emotional attachment to the site meet without either diminishing the other. The Gulf view from HB’s at dusk, with the water changing colour in the sequence that west-facing Gulf beaches produce each evening, is the experience that no dining room in a Four Seasons property elsewhere on the Florida coast can replicate. The Sunset Bar, adjacent, is where that same view is absorbed with a cocktail rather than a menu. These two venues are the property’s most distinctively local amenity and the ones that justify the location most specifically.
The Spa
A 30,000-square-foot two-level spa facility — one of the largest in the Four Seasons’ global portfolio — with sixteen treatment rooms, a thermal circuit, a rooftop lap pool, and a wellness programme built around the natural elements of the Gulf Coast environment. The scale of the investment reflects a property whose developers understood that the Gulf Coast’s luxury traveller, coming from the colder interior of the United States for the winter months, treats the spa as a primary purpose rather than an incidental amenity.
Who It’s For
The traveller who wants Florida’s Gulf Coast at its finest — the sunsets, the Gulf’s warm water, the specific character of Old Naples — in a property that matches the quality of Palm Beach and Miami’s best hotels without requiring either destination’s urban energy or east coast geography. Couples and honeymooners for whom the sunset over the Gulf from HB’s terrace is the image around which the trip is planned. Golfers willing to wait for the Tom Fazio course opening in 2026. Families who want the Four Seasons’ children’s infrastructure alongside a beach that is calm, warm, and unambiguously the point.
The Honest Note on Opening Year
Booking a hotel in its opening year always involves a degree of trust that the property’s ambition and the delivered experience are aligned. At Naples Beach Club, the early guest accounts — from journalists who visited at opening, from guests who stayed in the first weeks — describe a property that is delivering at the Four Seasons standard despite the incomplete campus. The beach is exceptional. The rooms are genuinely beautiful. The Merchant Room is a serious restaurant. The spa is operational and impressive. What is missing — the golf course, the full Market Square activation — will arrive in 2026. Guests who book in 2025-2026 knowing this are booking the finest Gulf Coast luxury resort experience currently available, with the understanding that it will be even more comprehensive in a year.
Practical Details
Rates from approximately $600 per night in off season, $1,200+ in peak season. No resort fee confirmed for the opening year; confirm current position at booking. Merchant Room reservations should be made before arrival. Golf course opening 2026 — confirm status if golf is a primary purpose. 15 minutes from Naples Airport for private aviation, 40 minutes from Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers for commercial flights.
Book Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort direct — rates and current availability.
