A family from Manhattan booked a Memorial Day weekend at The Ritz-Carlton Naples, Tiburón back in the spring, saw a note about ongoing renovations, and figured a few taped-off corners couldn't be that bad. They arrived to find the lobby wrapped in plastic sheeting, all but one restaurant closed, and jackhammering that started at 8:30 on a Saturday morning and didn't let up for hours. Their review is one of dozens now sitting on travel sites describing a resort that is, by its own admission, mid-transformation.
If you live in Tiburón, that review probably lands differently than it does for a tourist. This isn't a hotel you're choosing for a long weekend. It's the clubhouse three miles from your driveway, the place where your Signature or Golf membership gets you into the pool, the tennis courts, and whichever restaurant happens to be open that week. So the real question isn't whether the renovation is disruptive. It's whether right now, in mid-September, you're catching the resort at its most finished or its least.
The answer is its least. And the reason has less to do with how far along construction is and more to do with a scheduling gap almost none of the coverage of this project has spelled out.
The Restaurant Math Nobody Laid Out
Every press release about this renovation says the same thing: the property stays open, and the full transformation debuts in fall 2026. That's true, but it treats fall as one date instead of a sequence. The resort's own dining page draws a sharper line. Palmera, the new destination restaurant and grill built around Gulf Coast ingredients, and Fenrose, a French breakfast concept with an attached grab-and-go market called Café Fenrose, are both listed as opening in October 2026. Not "this fall." October.
Meanwhile Ría, the Latin American restaurant that's been the property's anchor for years, has already been split in two by the construction schedule. Through September, its lunch service still runs in its usual outdoor space, but dinner has been relocated to a temporary room called The Preserve. That's the arrangement that's been in place since the spring, and it holds until the end of this month.
Which means for the next two to three weeks, the resort is running on its narrowest footprint of the entire project. The two showpiece restaurants haven't opened. The old breakfast spot is presumably gone or going. Dinner is happening somewhere that was never meant to be permanent. If you've been putting off a visit because you assumed things would have settled by Labor Day, they haven't. October is the actual reset point, not September.
What Changes, Laid Side by Side
| Before the renovation | Right now (September 2026) | Starting October 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breakfast | Lemonía, Mediterranean-inspired | Status in flux during construction | Fenrose, French a la carte, plus Café Fenrose for grab-and-go |
| Signature dinner | Ría, Latin American, on its usual patio | Ría dinner service relocated to The Preserve | Ría returns to its own space; Palmera opens as the new anchor restaurant |
| Events and private functions | Existing meeting rooms | Limited by construction footprint | Swaying Palm, a new 2,700-square-foot venue with golf course views |
| Golf, tennis, waterpark | Tiburón Golf Club's two Greg Norman courses, Mouratoglou Tennis Center, The Reservoir | Unchanged | Unchanged |
The table looks tidy. Living through it hasn't been. That's the gap between a press release timeline and what a member actually walks into on a Tuesday night in September.
What Never Stopped
It's worth separating what's disrupted from what isn't, because the list of things that kept running the entire time is longer than the list of things that didn't. Tiburón Golf Club's two Greg Norman-designed courses have stayed open throughout, which matters given they've hosted the LPGA's CME Group Tour Championship, the PGA and LPGA's co-sanctioned Grant Thornton Invitational, and the Chubb Classic in recent years. The Mouratoglou Tennis Center, the first of its kind in Florida, kept its lesson schedule. The Reservoir waterpark never closed. And Ría's lunch service, the one piece of the old dining lineup that survived construction intact, has been serving its regular outdoor menu the entire time.
So the disruption has been concentrated almost entirely in three places: the lobby, the guest rooms, and dinner. If your relationship with the resort has been golf in the morning and a swim with the grandkids in the afternoon, you likely haven't noticed much. If it's been a Friday dinner reservation, you've been eating in a temporary room for months without necessarily knowing it was temporary.
Why the Reopening Lands in October, Specifically
The timing isn't incidental. Andrew Roberts, the resort's general manager, described the project in the official announcement as a milestone not just for guests but for what he called the Tiburón homeowners, language that's easy to miss in a hospitality trade release but pointed directly at the people who live inside the gates rather than the ones booking a room. Parker Torres Design, the studio that led the redesign, previously handled the makeover of the sister beachfront Ritz-Carlton in Naples, so this isn't an unfamiliar team learning the property. It's the same design language extended to the golf side.
An October debut also puts the finished product on the ground roughly six weeks before Grant Thornton Invitational week, which runs December 7 through 13 this year and brings 32 PGA and LPGA players to Tiburón's courses for equal prize money and nine hours of live coverage on Golf Channel and NBC. If you're the kind of resident who has hosted friends for that week before, or plans to this year, October is when Swaying Palm and Palmera will actually be ready to use rather than still under wraps. The Chubb Classic doesn't return until February 2027, which gives the new spaces a full season to settle in before that crowd shows up too.
What This Means If You're Planning Around It
If you have guests coming through the rest of September, set expectations the way the resort has: lunch at Ría is normal, dinner is in The Preserve, and the lobby may still show signs of the work. If you're planning something for October or later, particularly anything tied to Grant Thornton week, the newly opened Palmera and Swaying Palm are the venues to ask about rather than the temporary arrangements that have carried the property since spring. And if none of this affects your week-to-week at all because your Tiburón routine has always been golf, tennis, and the pool, the renovation has been mostly invisible to you regardless of what the lobby looks like right now.
The six weeks between now and the October reopening are the part of this project nobody wrote a headline about. They're also the part residents are living through in real time.
If you're weighing what life inside Tiburón actually looks like this season, beyond what a press release or a travel review can tell you, The Grant Group knows the neighborhood from the inside. Request a Private Consultation to talk through what's changing here and what it means for your corner of the community.
