Inside the gate, the South Course is closed to bare dirt and the Sports & Lifestyle Center is a steel frame. Outside the gate, the stretch of Immokalee Road you drive to get anywhere has, in the last six months, added a steakhouse, a Cuban kitchen, a Panda Express, a cold-pressed juice bar, and a graded pad for a Lexus showroom. The season Mediterra residents are living through is not the usual one. The club is quieter than it has been in years, and the corridor outside is doing more of the work.
That is the argument of this piece. If your routine at Mediterra depends on the South Course being open and the fitness building being where it was, this is the year to widen your radius.
Inside the Gate: The South Course Is Down Until November
Construction on the Tom Fazio-designed South Course officially began in June 2026. This is not a touch-up. Planned work includes a complete renovation of all green complexes, reshaping of greenside and fairway bunkers, and regrassing of fairways and rough, with additional turf treatments and selective landscape modifications for long-term playability. The project is being guided by an evaluation the club conducted with the United States Golf Association and the Fazio Group, with Leibold Irrigation and Construction Company executing on the ground. Completion is scheduled for early November 2026.
That timing matters for how the season plays out. The last major course work at Mediterra ran from 2015 into late 2016 and cost roughly $16 million across both courses; the current South Course project is a tighter, single-course rebuild aimed at getting members back on grass before high season peaks. COO and General Manager Carmen Mauceri has framed the work as preservation rather than reinvention, describing it as an investment in "the crown jewels of the Mediterra experience."
For a member household, the practical read is simple. Tee-time pressure shifts to the North Course, and the shoulder months where you would normally be walking eighteen at will are the months the club is asking you to be patient.
The Sports & Lifestyle Center Is Now a Frame
At the same time, the club is well into a reimagined Sports & Lifestyle Center. Structural framing has commenced. Foundational slab pours are done, vertical steel is anchored, and second-floor framing is underway. The project is designed by David Corban Architects with commercial builder BUILD executing the work, part of a broader modernization of the 60,000-square-foot main clubhouse and the 1,697-acre master plan.
Two projects on the same campus, one closing the fitness routine, the other closing the golf routine, is not a coincidence in scheduling. It is the club front-loading disruption so both amenities land renewed before next season. It also means that for one summer and one fall, "going to the club" is a narrower proposition than most members are used to.
Which brings us to the interesting question: where are Mediterra residents actually spending their time this year?
The Immokalee Road Corridor Grew Up
The corridor Mediterra residents use to get on and off Livingston Road has been a work in progress for a decade. In 2026 it stopped being a promise and started being a functioning dining grid. Tim Aten's mid-year restaurant tracking for Gulfshore Business documented an unusually dense wave of North Naples openings in the first half of the year.
Here is what is new, close enough to Mediterra to matter, with the addresses you will actually type into a map:
| What | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Connors Steak & Seafood | 950 Immokalee Road, Granada Shoppes | Opened Q1 2026 in a ~10,000-sq-ft former Walgreens; fourth Florida location for the brand |
| Havana Libre Cuban Cuisine | 8850 Founders Square Drive, Unit 215 | Second location for Angel Madera's family; more than 4,000 sq ft with a full bar and outdoor dining |
| Panda Express | Founders Square | Immokalee at Collier Boulevard |
| Shake Shack | Mercato | First regional location for the chain |
| ChaChaCha Fusion Cuban | The Strand | Opened February 2026 |
| Beyond Juicery + Eatery | The Pavilion | U.S. 41 at Vanderbilt Beach Road |
| The Roast & Rush Society | Galleria at Vanderbilt | Coffee and kava |
Two things about that list are worth pausing on.
First, the density. Six of these are within a fifteen-minute drive of Mediterra's front gate on Livingston. That is a real change from three years ago, when a mid-week dinner meant either the club or a drive south to Mercato. Founders Square in particular has stopped being a suburban strip and started functioning like a small town center, now lined with Lake Park Diner's second location, Oar & Iron Raw Bar & Grill, South Street, Outback, Tacos & Tequila Cantina, Skillets, Crisp & Green, Fuji, and the new Havana Libre.
Second, the mix. Connors is a full-service steakhouse in the price band residents were previously driving to Waterside Shops or Fifth Avenue South to reach. Beyond Juicery, Crisp & Green, and Roast & Rush are the morning-and-post-workout tier that the club fitness center used to absorb entirely. When the Sports & Lifestyle Center finishes framing and finish work, a member's smoothie routine has three new civilian answers.
The Auto Row Angle
If you have watched crews move earth on Immokalee between Livingston and Juliet Boulevard, that is the site Germain Motor Co. cleared for a new Lexus dealership. It joins a wider North Naples auto build-out that includes Genesis of Naples on Pine Ridge Road just west of I-75, a 12-acre campus with more than 30,000 square feet targeted to open in early 2027 and privately owned by the Zellers family, longtime operators of Tamiami Ford, Tamiami Hyundai, and Genesis of Naples.
The read for a Mediterra resident is mundane and useful: routine service is about to get closer. If your household leases German or Japanese luxury, the days of a Colonial Boulevard trip for service are numbered.
What About Restaurants at the Club
The club's culinary program has not stopped. Members still have the main clubhouse dining, the Beach Club along the Gulf, and the club's usual social calendar, which the Yelp-listed Club at Mediterra profile describes as an "unsurpassed level of member service." The point is not that the club has receded. The point is that for a controlled window, member routines will shift outward, and the corridor is finally deep enough to absorb them without a drive to downtown.
That is also why the "what's new" conversation this year is not a novelty list. It is a substitution list.
A Short Season Playbook
Rather than a ranked list, treat this as a set of swaps that make sense while the club works through its projects:
- Weeknight dinner that used to be the grill room. Try Connors on the Immokalee end of Granada Shoppes, or Oar & Iron for a raw-bar option at Founders Square.
- Sunday-morning fitness routine off-property. Beyond Juicery at The Pavilion pairs with a walk at the Gordon River Greenway if you want to keep the mileage.
- Family lunch when the kids are visiting. Havana Libre's Founders Square location roughly doubles the footprint of the original Golden Gate Parkway restaurant and now has a full bar and outdoor seating, which the older location did not.
- Wednesday coffee that is not the clubhouse. The Roast & Rush Society in the Galleria at Vanderbilt is quiet mid-morning and closer than Third Street.
- A short-drive steakhouse that is not booked out. Connors at 950 Immokalee is a fresher reservation than most Fifth Avenue rooms this July.
None of that displaces the club. It supplements it during the exact window the club is asking members to be flexible.
What This Means When You Look Down the Road
Mediterra's amenity story has always been that it is worth the drive up Livingston because the club, the Beach Club, and the neighborhood parks add up to a full life inside 1,697 acres. That has not changed. What has changed is that the acreage outside the gate is finally pulling its weight. When the South Course reopens in early November and the Sports & Lifestyle Center comes online after it, residents will re-enter a club they know with a corridor they have gotten to know better in the meantime. That is a better position than the one members were in five years ago, when the drive off Livingston felt like a compromise.
If you are already living in Mediterra, the practical suggestion is this: use the summer and fall to build the muscle memory of the corridor. When high season lands and the club reopens on all cylinders, you will have both.
If you own here and are thinking about the next chapter of your Naples life, or you are watching the North Naples luxury market from the outside and want a candid read on how these club projects are moving Mediterra values, The Whitcomb Group tracks this community week by week. Reach out and we will tell you what the neighbors are seeing.
