Why The Club at Mediterra Is Tackling Two Major Rebuilds at Once

Drive past the clubhouse this summer and you will pass two active job sites within a few hundred yards of each other. Steel and foundation work are rising where the new Sports & Lifestyle Center will stand, and a stretch of the South Course has been stripped down to sand and irrigation pipe. Neither is a small undertaking on its own. Together, they represent the biggest capital push Mediterra has approved since the last golf course renovation wrapped nearly a decade ago.

Most residents have picked up fragments of this. A notice about tee sheet changes. A rendering shared at a Grille Room dinner. What gets lost is that these are two separate projects that happen to be running through the same year, not two phases of one coordinated plan. Understanding why tells you more about what the next two seasons will actually feel like than either announcement does by itself.

A New Building Broke Ground in February

The Club at Mediterra began construction on its new Sports & Lifestyle Center in North Naples, with excavation and foundation work underway. This is not a renovation of the existing Sports Club. It is a new structure, designed by David Corban Architects with construction led by BUILD, interior design by HINT | Harris Interiors, and landscape design by LJA Engineering.

The specs give a sense of scale. The facility will feature a 5,600-square-foot fitness center, yoga, spin and Pilates studios, expanded locker rooms with plunge pools and infrared saunas, and an enlarged spa, plus outdoor amenities including a bocce garden, fitness areas and terraces overlooking the grand lawn. Architectural highlights include a porte cochere and elevated building entrance, a grand staircase and a cupola that reflects Mediterra's classic design aesthetic.

COO and GM Carmen Mauceri framed the project as continuity as much as expansion, noting the club is "building thoughtfully for the future of Mediterra as we have done over the past 15 years." Completion is expected by summer 2028.

If you're a member who uses the current Sports Club regularly, the club hasn't published a date for when that facility might close or transition. Given how the club handled golf course construction the last time around, keeping something playable while the new thing gets built, it's a reasonable bet the existing gym, spa, and pool stay in rotation for most of this build cycle.

Four Months Later, the Fairways Opened Up

In early June, a second and unrelated project started. Construction on The Club at Mediterra's South Course officially began, marking the first phase of the club's initiative to enhance the golf experience. The work is being carried out by Leibold Irrigation and Construction Company, and planned improvements include the complete renovation of all green complexes, reshaping of greenside and fairway bunkers, and regrassing of fairways and rough.

The reconstruction is guided by an evaluation conducted in partnership with the United States Golf Association and the Fazio Group, the original architects of Mediterra's golf courses. Mauceri, who also oversees this project, kept the framing consistent with the building announcement: "This is about more than a renovation."

What the current announcement does not include is a target reopening date. That's worth sitting with for a second, because the last time Mediterra rebuilt its courses, it did the opposite.

What the Last Renovation Tells Us About This One

Mediterra has been through this before. Between 2015 and 2016, the club rebuilt both 18-hole courses in a project members had approved with a specific number attached and a specific calendar attached to it.

The pattern in the timing is consistent. Golf construction here has always been scheduled for the stretch of the year when the seasonal population thins out and tee sheets have room to absorb a closed hole or two. What's different this time is the silence around an end date. Back then, the club told members exactly which December each course would reopen. This time, "first phase" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it's the honest read: this project is likely bigger, or at least less finished in scope, than the club is ready to commit a date to yet.

If you're used to Mediterra's rhythm, that's the real signal here. Expect this to run longer than a single summer.

What Doesn't Change This Season

Not everything at the club is mid-construction. Some of it just finished.

• A new 1,850-square-foot outdoor covered bar terrace opened with unfettered views of one of the community's two Tom Fazio-designed golf courses.
• The clubhouse's Grille Room, Lounge, Ballroom, and Tavern on 18 with its Fire Pit Patio continue to operate as they have, untouched by either current project.
• The private, 10,000-square-foot Gulf-front Beach Club on Little Hickory Island, already renovated in an earlier cycle, isn't part of this round of work.
• The Sports Club's fitness center, spa, and bocce ball courts, along with the tennis program, remain in daily use.

So the disruption is real but contained. You're not losing the club. You're losing part of one golf course and gaining a construction fence near the parking area while a second building goes up somewhere you weren't using anyway.

Why This Matters Beyond the Fencing

Mediterra doesn't take on projects like this casually. This is a community that has won Community of the Year honors 17 times in 21 years from the Collier Building Industry Association, and its 36 holes are woven through nature preserves, lakes and wetlands certified as Audubon's first-ever Silver Sanctuary, a designation the club has to actively maintain, not just earn once. Reconstructing a golf course inside a certified sanctuary is a different, slower kind of project than regrading a fairway on an ordinary course, which may be part of why this timeline is looser than the last one.

None of this is happening in isolation, either. The Sports & Lifestyle Center groundbreaking and the South Course reconstruction were announced within four months of each other in the same year, which is unusual even by Mediterra's own history of steady reinvestment. Reasonable people can read that either as good planning, front-loading the inconvenience into a single stretch of years rather than spreading it out over a decade, or as a coincidence of budget cycles and contractor availability. The club hasn't said which. What the record shows is that both projects are real, both are underway right now, and both have public groundbreaking dates you can check for yourself: the Sports & Lifestyle Center's construction start was reported by Gulfshore Business in February, and the South Course reconstruction was covered by Golf Course Industry in June.

If you live here, the practical takeaway is simple. Plan your golf around the North Course for the foreseeable future, expect the new bar terrace and existing clubhouse venues to be your steady ground through the construction, and don't be surprised if "first phase" stretches well past this coming season. Mediterra has rebuilt itself before without losing what makes it Mediterra. The fencing is temporary. The card rooms, the Tavern, the eight miles of trails, and the reason you moved here in the first place aren't going anywhere.

If you're weighing a move to Mediterra or another North Naples golf community and want a clearer read on how ongoing club investments like this tend to play out for owners over time, Owens Jablonski | Gulf Coast Advisors can walk you through what we're seeing on the ground. Request a concierge consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.