The Ponte Vedra Inn & Club Renovation Isn't Almost Over. It's Barely Started.

Walk Ponte Vedra Boulevard on any weekday morning and you pass two active job sites within a quarter mile of each other. At 240 Ponte Vedra Blvd, a two-story building with a four-level parking garage is taking shape where the old fitness wing used to sit. Down the street at 261, crews are working on a new oceanfront building that will eventually hold two restaurants and a pair of pools. Both sites belong to the same resort, the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, and both are part of a single renovation that most people who live near it assume ends in early 2027.

It doesn't. What wraps up in 2027 is the first phase of a project that St. Johns County approved to run for decades. If you live on or near the Boulevard, that distinction matters more than the completion date everyone keeps repeating.

What's Actually Under Construction Right Now

The two buildings going up are the Sports Club and the Surf Club, and they were permitted separately about four months apart. St. Johns County issued the building permit for the Sports Club on November 20, 2024, putting the project cost at $65 million for a 105,314-square-foot building with a gym, daily lockers, and a four-level parking structure attached. The Surf Club followed with a foundation permit in February 2025 and a full construction permit on March 6, 2025, a 94,343-square-foot building priced at $44 million with Brasfield & Gorrie as the contractor. Jacksonville-based England-Thims & Miller handled the civil engineering on both buildings.

The old Surf Club closed December 1, 2024, which is why the resort has been running an Interim Surf Club out of the Atlantic House ever since, with beach rentals, a kids' program, and grab-and-go food standing in for what used to be there. The gym relocated across the street. The racquet club moved about three miles away. All of it is meant to hold the place together until the new buildings open, and the resort's own renovation page still lists early 2027 as the target for unveiling both.

The Six-Phase Plan Nobody Repeats Out Loud

Here's what gets lost in the "hang in there until 2027" version of this story: the Sports Club and Surf Club are phase one. The rezoning that made this construction possible, a Planned Unit Development approved by county commissioners, covers the Inn & Club and its sister property, The Lodge & Club, together. Reporting on that approval has described the timeline two different ways. One account of the same PUD puts the project at five phases over as much as 25 years. Coverage from the Jax Daily Record, repeated across more than one article, puts it at six phases over 30 years. Even the people tracking the paperwork can't quite agree on how many stages this becomes, which tells you something about how far out the later phases actually sit on the calendar.

What's clear is that the current construction only accounts for what's happening at the Inn & Club. The Lodge & Club, on the west side of the Boulevard, has its own phase still ahead: a renovated Fitness Club building, a new parking garage, and additional pools. None of that has broken ground.

The zoning also permits the Inn & Club to eventually grow to as many as 349 rooms and up to 595,000 square feet of restaurant, bar, and recreation space, up from the 262 rooms and suites the resort currently lists. That kind of room count doesn't get built in one push. If you've been treating the current dust and detours as a temporary state to wait out, the more accurate read is that construction on some part of this campus is likely to be a recurring feature of the Boulevard for a good chunk of the next two decades, not a phase that ends when the ribbon gets cut on the Surf Club.

Where Dinner Actually Happens This Month

None of that means the resort has gone quiet. Dining has consolidated rather than closed. Right now, the working rotation looks like this:

• The Inn Dining Room for breakfast and a nightly evening service
• The Golf Club Dining Room, open seven days a week for lunch and dinner
• The Tavern, running expanded hours with a refreshed menu
• The Sandpiper, for grab-and-go
• The Bar at The Driftwood House, next to the Interim Surf Club, for cocktails and light fare

Oceanfront dining and the recreational pools are off the table until the new buildings open. Guests and members get shuttle access to The Lodge & Club, a mile and a half south, for pool time in the interim. It's a workaround, but it's one the resort has kept running continuously since the closures began, which is its own kind of evidence that this operation isn't pausing for construction. It's building around it.

The Calendar Didn't Skip a Beat

The clearest sign that life at the Inn & Club hasn't gone dormant showed up on the club's own event board this month. On August 5, the resort hosted Delicious Destinations, its signature culinary event, for the first time raising money for Ascension St. Vincent's Foundation across all four of its local hospitals. Foundation President Caitlin Brunell and chef Hermann Muller appeared together to preview the event, the kind of local, on-the-ground detail that doesn't show up unless you're actually watching the resort's calendar rather than just its construction fencing.

That wasn't a one-off. The club's own listings show a wine tasting featuring selections from Washington and Oregon, a monthly Trivia Night, and a National Golf Month celebration all scheduled through the rest of August, with a Château Montelena wine event and a comedy night from Josh Nelson already on the books for early September. None of that reads like an institution marking time until 2027. It reads like one that expects to keep running its full social calendar through however many more years of phased construction come next.

What This Means If You Live Here

The practical takeaway for anyone on Ponte Vedra Boulevard isn't "wait two more years." It's that the current mix of scaffolding, shuttle vans to the Lodge, and a gym that moved across the street is closer to a preview of the neighborhood's medium-term normal than a temporary inconvenience with a clean end date. The Sports Club and Surf Club opening will be a real milestone, and the resort's near-centennial, it opened in 1928, gives that milestone some weight. But the Lodge & Club's own renovation phase is still sitting on the other side of the street, unstarted, inside the same approval that got us here.

If you're the kind of neighbor who tracks these things because you actually use the place, plan your evenings around the Golf Club Dining Room and The Tavern for now, and don't be surprised if the next wave of permits shows up on the Lodge side once the Surf Club ribbon gets cut.

For anyone thinking through what any of this means for a home search or a sale near Ponte Vedra Boulevard, Rory Connolly and the Connolly Team have spent years tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening on the ground here.