Is Naples the New Palm Beach?
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Within an hour of checking in at the Ritz-Carlton Naples, my children and I were knee deep in a frantic sandcastle competition. We were putting the finishing touches on our sand octopus when a stampede of thirtysomethings trampled over it in their rush to the Gumbo Limbo, where house music oontz-oontz-oontzed. Where had all the grandparents gone?
Naples, Florida, a place I’ve always associated with nursing homes, graying corporate retreats, and canasta championships, is no longer just for old-timers. Now it’s bursting with new settlers, new wealth, and New Yorkers. In the last year alone, the once sleepy enclave listed the country’s highest-priced residential property, at nearly $300 million, and hosted the nation’s highest-grossing charity wine auction, raising $33 million. The sale of Bentleys may be down nationwide, but not here; Naples was among the pricey car brand’s largest markets in the past year. Collier County, where Naples is located, had the third-highest wealth migration in America in 2021; the adjusted gross annual income of new residents was $4 billion that year.
“It’s basically unrecognizable from when I was a kid,” says the author Carl Hiaasen. It was in the last century, he notes, that well-heeled Midwesterners took I-75 down from Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan and stopped in Naples, where they built their homes along the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, Northeasterners took I-95 straight down the East Coast and settled on the shores of the Atlantic. The landscape helped inform the vibe.
While Palm Beach has long been considered glitzier, you wouldn’t know it from the sales at Marissa Collections, which has been in Naples since 1975 and recently expanded to Palm Beach. “If you made a Venn diagram, there would be a 70 percent overlap in the jewelry that people buy in Naples and Palm Beach,” says Marissa CEO Jay Hartington.
While Palm Beach was exploding with newbies during and after the pandemic, some sought an alternative. From 2020 to 2022 Collier County saw a 5.5 percent increase in its population, according to the Census Bureau. From 2020 to 2024 it grew from about 377,000 people to an estimated 405,000, and the number of 40-to-44-year-olds increased from 18,339 to about 20,218, according to a Lightcast study.
That’s despite the state’s vulnerability to hurricanes. Milton made landfall more than 100 miles away, but Collier County was still left with $280 million in damages. Hurricane Ian, in 2022, was far more destructive, leading to expansive renovation projects, including the Ritz-Carlton’s.
“Florida has roughly $4.48 million per hour coming into the state from new residents,” says Michael Wynn, who is president of the chain Sunshine Ace Hardware and has lived in Naples his entire life. “Old Naples was a sweet beach community,” says photographer Claiborne Swanson Frank. “The Naples of today is unrecognizable to the one I grew up visiting.”
Now the Naples marina is crowded with boats and jet-skis, and restaurants like BiCE and Le Colonial (imported from Milan and New York, respectively) punctuate clean, palm-lined streets alongside standbys such as Ridgway Bar and Grill. Fifth Avenue South, Naples’s main drag, still makes the city look like a village, with its white colonial-style façades alternating with pink stucco storefronts and terra-cotta-colored roofs. That is, until the annual supercar showcase fills the streets with Ferraris and Lamborghinis. You might see a stray celebrity, such as Judge Judy, Bob Seger, or Jay Leno. Most of the time, though, downtown Naples feels the way Palm Beach’s Worth Avenue did 20 years ago—without the Rover Rage.
There is old money here. It has just never drawn attention to itself. Blake Gable, a real estate executive who is part of the Collier family (as in Collier County), remembers when he realized he lived in a staggeringly affluent community. He was 10 or 11 and was raising money for Little League baseball by trying to sell calendars around the neighborhood. As he biked up the street with his father, a man came out of his house, bought one of his calendars, and gave him a baseball jersey. Blake asked his father, “Why did he give me that?” The reply: “He owns the team.”
The latest arrivals may not subscribe to the same rules of discretion. This year the city’s most celebrated charity auction, at the Naples Winter Wine Festival, attracted unprecedented flash, with its most expensive lot ever going for $2.7 million—the prize being a week aboard former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s yacht, Whisper. Next came an all-electric Rolls-Royce Spectre for $1.4 million, bought by the 45-year-old Turkish-born software designer, entrepreneur, and Naples resident Onur Haytac.
“Half the bidders were under 60,” says Amanda Harlan, whose family owns Harlan Estate, a winery in Napa Valley. “It’s a big draw now, even for European vineyards and champagne houses.”
Haytac’s office, as a matter of a fact, is located near Venture X, a spacious Silicon Valley–style office hive filled with startups and software companies that’s emblematic of the shifting Naples scene. The tech bros there are the busy-bee patrons of coffee shops like Narrative Coffee Roasters, hip malls such as Mercato, and swanky hotels like the Ritz-Carlton Naples, which reopened last year after a $50 million renovation. In 2026 Rosewood will open on Gulf Shore Boulevard 42 beachfront units designed by the New York–based design firm Lillian Wu. Current listings there range from $10.5 million to $35 million. The Four Seasons Beach Club hasn’t announced its opening date, but it has broken ground on Gulf Shore Boulevard as well. “You’ve got that cascade effect of richer people coming down to Naples, buying, and telling their friends,” Gable says.
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The city has seen an influx of cultural capital as well. Theater producer Kristen Coury moved to Naples from New York 20 years ago after discovering the city on her way to Marco Island. She stayed the night and never left. She went on to establish a local theater, Gulfshore Playhouse. Her first board member was her real estate broker, because she didn’t know anyone else. Fast-forward to this fall, and after a $72 million campaign the Gulfshore Playhouse will have its own campus, in the new Naples Design District. She expects a larger, younger audience than in years past. “People came in droves during the pandemic,” she says. “They just stayed.”
But unlike other towns transformed by pandemic interlopers, the locals here don’t fear their city coming down with a case of creeping Palm Beachism. For one thing, Naples was zoned to prevent commercial development directly on the beach, says Scott Lutgert, a real estate developer whose family has been in the area since the 1960s. And while there are a few hotels and private beach clubs, the majority of the beachfront remains residential and accessible to the public.
Even the water is calmer, as my family and I learned. “In the gulf, people don’t worry about young kids getting pulled out to sea,” says Hartington. He is now in his forties and has noticed more and more of his contemporaries moving into town.
It’s not just the strong public school system and the low cost of living, although the fact that Florida has no state income tax is a sweet perk. Hartington attributes the newfound interest to a subtle quality money can’t buy: “Naples is still under the radar—for now.”
This story appears in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "Escape Worth Avenue." SUBSCRIBE NOW
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