If you live inside the gate, you already know the beach club has been full most nights since the Shell Dining Room reopened. You have probably heard the phrase "The Cove" at a cocktail hour and wondered when the old pool east of the clubhouse actually comes down. And if you play golf, you have watched crews break ground on the 13 acres that used to be the practice range.
Three projects, three timelines, one club to keep running through all of it. The interesting part is how the board sequenced the work.
The 2026–2028 capital program is not three parallel construction jobs. It is a relay. Each phase is timed so a different amenity category is offline at any given moment, and the club never loses two at once.
That is the through-line worth understanding as a resident. What follows is the schedule, the trade-offs baked into it, and where daily life at Grand Harbor actually shifts.
The vote that set the clock
In April 2026, members approved the Capital Improvements Program by a 77 percent margin, authorizing roughly $36 million in new work on top of what the club has already spent since 2021. By the time the clubhouse reopens, cumulative investment across a seven-year window reaches about $65 million, according to General Manager Michael Gibson.
The membership approving that check is not the membership that lived here in 2020. The roster has grown from 586 to 1,120, and the average member age has dropped from 79 to 72. Eight new pickleball courts went in. Both championship courses, Pete Dye's Harbor Course and Joe Lee's River Course, have already been renovated. What the April vote funded is everything left on the list.
Here is how the next 24 months land on the calendar.
| Timing | What opens | What closes |
|---|---|---|
| October 2026 | 13-acre practice facility with café, restrooms, training and rehab tech | The Cove groundbreaks east of the clubhouse |
| Fall 2027 | The Cove Lifestyle + Fitness Center (approx. 15,000 sq ft) | Main clubhouse enters full renovation |
| May 2027 to early summer 2028 | Clubhouse construction window | Card room, formal dining, golf shop, locker rooms all offline in stages |
| Early summer 2028 | Renovated 32,000+ sq ft clubhouse with new dining wing and indoor/outdoor bar | Program complete |
Read that table twice. The practice range comes back online the same month The Cove goes offline as a construction zone. The Cove opens about the time the clubhouse dining room shuts down. That is the relay.
Phase one: the practice facility, back this fall
The $2.5 million practice-range rebuild covers 13 acres and is scheduled for completion in October 2026. When it reopens, it will include a café, new restrooms, and current-generation training and rehab technology. Gibson has said the inspiration was a similar setup members saw at Orchid Island Golf & Beach Club, where the golf clubhouse dining was expanded to take in a lake view. Members came home and asked for the same.
The practical effect for residents: short-game practice returns before season starts. If your winter rhythm has been "range, lunch, nine holes," the range portion resumes on a normal schedule this fall for the first time in a year.
Phase two: The Cove replaces the old pool
Around the same week the practice range reopens, crews move east of the main clubhouse to the site of the current, underused swimming pool. That pool comes out. In its place goes The Cove Lifestyle + Fitness Center, a standalone building of roughly 15,000 square feet designed by Leo A. Daly, a 110-year-old architecture and engineering firm.
The program inside is closer to a resort spa than a country club gym:
- Fitness space with wide views of the Indian River Lagoon
- Pilates studios and spa treatment rooms
- A resort-style swimming pool with sun terrace
- A café and outdoor gazebo bar
- A Zen garden
The exterior is worth noting. The curved white-panel and glass façade is a deliberate break from the Mediterranean Revival vocabulary that has defined the community since the original clubhouse went up 40 years ago. If you have watched the newer GHO Homes product going in and wondered why the architecture reads more contemporary than the legacy houses, The Cove is the club's version of that same shift.
Groundbreaking is targeted for October 1, 2026, with a 12 to 13 month construction window. That puts the opening in the 2027–28 winter season.
Phase three: the clubhouse, May 2027 through summer 2028
This is the phase that will most reshape day-to-day life at the club, because the main clubhouse is where the card room, the formal dining room, the golf shop, and the locker rooms live. Peacock + Lewis, the Palm Beach firm that has designed many of Vero's club interiors, drew the plans.
The changes worth knowing about:
- A two-story, 6,000 square-foot addition. The upper level adds 3,000 square feet of interior and patio dining. The ground floor adds a 3,000 square-foot indoor/outdoor bar. The current bar tucked into the formal dining room has been a bottleneck at dinnertime for years, and this replaces it.
- The card room doubles in size to seat 100 players.
- A new grab-and-go café and marketplace, which is a category the clubhouse has not had before.
- Renovated locker rooms and an enlarged golf shop.
- The central interior staircase in the lobby comes out, opening up circulation.
Construction begins in May 2027 and wraps in early summer 2028. Expect the clubhouse to operate in phases during that stretch, with dining and social functions relocating to the Beach Club and, once open, The Cove.
Where dinner actually goes during the shuffle
The reason the sequencing matters is dining capacity. The Beach Club renovation, the earlier $5.6 million three-phase project on the barrier island, worked so well that it has been running near capacity most nights. Chef Rico Hosena's Shell Dining Room, with its sushi and raw bar, and the Full Moon Rising beach parties have become the club's default evening. Gibson has been candid that The Cove needs to open in part to relieve pressure on the Beach Club.
Here is what that looks like from a member's perspective across the next two seasons:
- Winter 2026–27: Beach Club stays the primary dinner venue. The old clubhouse dining room is still open. The Cove is under construction and invisible from the golf side.
- Winter 2027–28: The Cove opens with a café and full-service bar. The clubhouse dining room closes for renovation. Evening options rotate between the Beach Club, The Cove, and the Pete Dye Grill up at the golf clubhouse.
- Summer 2028 forward: New clubhouse dining wing plus indoor/outdoor bar comes online. Full four-venue dining footprint.
If you host family or grandkids in a specific window, that middle winter is the one to plan around. The Cove will absorb the daytime and casual traffic that used to land in the clubhouse.
Membership economics, briefly
The board is funding this program in part through initiation-fee increases scheduled for this fall. Full golf goes from $75,000 to $100,000. Social climbs from $45,000 to $65,000. These are new-member numbers, not assessments on the existing roster, but they matter for existing residents because they set the tempo of who joins next and how quickly waiting lists behave. When the practice facility opens in October, the new golf pricing is in effect.
The daily rhythm question
Strip away the renderings and the dollar figures and the question a resident actually asks is this: what does a normal Tuesday look like in 2027 that it did not look like in 2025?
The honest answer is that the amenities are shifting from a golf-and-social club with a beach adjunct to a wellness-and-dining club with a strong golf program. The card room doubling in size, the two-story dining addition, the spa rooms, the Pilates studios, the second pool at The Cove, the grab-and-go marketplace, the outdoor bar. None of those are golf-first amenities. They are lifestyle amenities that assume more members are here year-round, more members are under 75, and more members want a place to be at 10 a.m. that is not a tee box.
That is the quiet argument the capital program is making. The vote in April was 77 percent in favor because most of the roster already lives that way.
If you have questions about how construction phasing will affect your specific street inside the community, or you are watching the market shift that has followed each phase of the club's revival, Kathleen Provancher and the team have been tracking Grand Harbor closely since the first pandemic-era renovation. Reach out any time. Get Your Instant Home Valuation to see where your home stands against the recalibrated market this fall.
