Drive north from Bay Colony's gatehouse toward Vanderbilt Beach Road this month and the corner looks different than it did even a year ago. The construction fencing that lined the block for most of 2025 is gone. A residence tower that spent two years as steel framing and mesh now reads as a finished building, glass and all. And where an ordinary planted median used to sit at one of the busiest intersections in North Naples, a 30-foot stainless steel sculpture now marks the entrance to Vanderbilt Beach.
None of this happened inside Bay Colony. The two gatehouses, the mangrove-lined approach, the beach club that got its full redesign back in 2018, all of it looks the way it has for years. What changed is the stretch of Gulf Shore Drive just outside those gates, the corridor every Bay Colony resident drives to reach Waterside Shops, Mercato, or an evening at Artis-Naples. That corridor just finished the busiest construction cycle it has seen in a long while, and the finished version looks nothing like the site anyone driving past in 2023 would have pictured.
That is worth understanding on its own terms, not because it changes anything about life behind Bay Colony's gates, but because it changes what residents see and drive past every day. The community itself has not broken ground in years and, by the shape of its own footprint, probably never will again. The block around it, on the other hand, is completing what may be the last wave of new construction this particular stretch of coastline sees for a long stretch of years.
The Tower Between the Gulf and the Lagoon
The building at the center of that change is The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Naples, a six-acre project sitting at the corner of Vanderbilt Beach Road and Gulf Shore Drive, positioned between the Gulf of Mexico on one side and Vanderbilt Lagoon on the other. According to reporting from earlier this year, the project has entered its final stages, with only a limited number of its Bay Residences still available. First residents are expected to move in this summer, and closings on the remaining Bay Residences are scheduled to begin over the same stretch of months.
The developer's own project page describes 128 residences with water views split across two distinct footprints. The Bay Residences sit closer to the lagoon and come with full marina access, the kind of arrangement that lets an owner keep a boat steps from the front door. The Tower Residences face the Gulf directly, built around indoor-outdoor rooms that open straight onto the water. Between the two, the project has room for a 28,000-square-foot club building, a spa, and a marina, all of it new to a corner of Naples that spent the better part of two years looking like an active job site.
For a Bay Colony resident whose daily loop already runs past this intersection on the way to the beach or to dinner, this is the difference between driving past a construction zone and driving past a finished neighbor. It is the kind of change that shows up in traffic patterns and parking before it shows up anywhere else.
A Sculpture Big Enough to Change How the Intersection Reads
The other new fixture at that corner is smaller in square footage but harder to miss. Ritz-Carlton Residences, Naples recently installed a 30-foot public art sculpture titled "Vivacious" at the Vanderbilt Beach Gateway, the entrance plaza marking what the developer's press materials describe as one of the most prominent intersections in Naples. The piece was created by Arkansas-based artist Hunter Brown and now stands as a permanent fixture at the gateway, the kind of landmark that gives an intersection a name people actually use instead of a set of cross streets.
It is a small detail against the scale of a residential tower, but it is the kind of detail that changes how a familiar drive feels. A corner that used to register as construction noise now has a fixed point, something to describe when giving directions or noticing, for the first time in a while, that the project across the street is actually finished.
Bay Colony Isn't Building Anything, and It Never Will Again
Set that change against what has not moved inside Bay Colony's own gates. The community's beachfront lineup, the Remington, Windsor, Biltmore, Brighton, Carlysle, and Contessa, along with four off-beach towers further from the water, has stood in roughly its current form for years. The most recent significant work inside the gates was the Remington's 2016 remaster and the beach club's full redesign in 2018. There has been no new ground broken inside Bay Colony since, and there is a simple reason for that: a gated, beachfront enclave with two guarded entrances and a fixed footprint does not have room to add another tower without changing what makes it Bay Colony in the first place.
That stillness is not a gap in the market. It is the point of owning here. But it means the visible change residents experience will keep coming from just outside the gates rather than from within them. The pattern extends slightly further into Pelican Bay itself, the larger private community that Bay Colony sits inside. Word inside Pelican Bay is that Épique, one of the last new high-rise opportunities the community is expected to allow, was targeting a mid-2026 delivery timeline. Once that project and the Ritz-Carlton Residences both finish, the immediate beachfront corridor running past Bay Colony may not see another new address break ground for a long stretch of years. The corner is finishing its last build cycle at the same time the community behind the gates continues doing exactly what it has always done, which is nothing new at all.
What This Actually Changes for the Walk to the Beach
None of this alters property lines or amenity access inside Bay Colony. What it changes is texture. The drive to Waterside Shops or Mercato passes a finished building instead of a job site. The walk toward Artis-Naples and the Baker Museum passes a sculpture instead of a chain-link fence. New neighbors are arriving at the Ritz-Carlton Residences this summer, which means new faces on the beach path and new boats using the marina at the lagoon side of that project, but it also means the noise, dust, and lane closures that came with two years of active construction are finally behind the corridor for good.
For residents who have watched this corner since the cranes went up, the practical result is straightforward. The busiest stretch of construction this part of Gulf Shore Drive has seen in years is closing out at almost the same moment, and what replaces it is a finished tower, a marked gateway, and a corridor that is about to settle into the same kind of quiet Bay Colony has maintained behind its own gates all along.
Understanding a neighborhood at this level, not just what is for sale inside it, but what is changing on the block around it, is the kind of local read that only comes from paying attention over time. J2 Luxury Group tracks these shifts across Naples' beachfront communities because the corner outside a gate matters just as much as what sits behind it.
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