A six-story condominium featuring 12 spacious, resort-style homes passed its final approval and can now move ahead with construction on the site of the former Bahama Club on Naples’ Miracle Mile. 

The city’s Design Review Board on Jan. 22 unanimously approved KT Naples Owner LLC’s final design review for Olana, at 1121 Gulf Shore Blvd. N., which will feature spacious 9,000- to 10,000-square-foot, five-bedroom condos, each with a sauna, steam room, hot-and-cold plunge pool and private garage.  

DRB members lavished praise on the building, landscaping plans and Gulf views, noting landscape architect Maggie Watts and architect Pinar Harris listened to their concerns last summer, when they asked for more robust and interesting plantings and to modify the building design.  

“You’ve created a botanical garden,” DRB Chair Steve Hruby told Watts, of Miami-based Enea Garden Design Inc. “It is special and it’s going to enhance your building.” 

“… This is a refreshing change to the kind of condominiums we’ve been getting,” Hruby, an architect, told Harris, who works for global design firm 10SB Architects in Coral Gables. “It’s a new architectural firm coming in with an international perspective on it. I like the interplay of the horizontal and the vertical. It’s nicely proportioned and your use of materials is very elegant, very restrained.” 

The 2.52-acre property sits on 220 feet of Gulf of Mexico beachfront originally developed in the late 1950s as a 36-unit low-rise condominium, the Bahama Club. After it sustained major damage from Hurricane Ian, Delray Beach real estate developer The Kolter Group and Miami-based BH Group, a private equity firm, purchased it for $102.6 million in spring 2024. Soon after, a demolition permit was issued to clear the site of all existing structures, driveways, sidewalks, vegetation and utilities and the site was razed last summer and fall. 

The site is adjacent to the 150-home Naples Beach Club, a Four Seasons Resort, and the 42-home Rosewood Residences Naples to the north, where construction began in September. It’s bordered by the two-story Oceanside condominiums to the south, nine-story Via Delfino in Coquina Sands to the north, the Gulf of Mexico to the west and Gulf Shore Boulevard North to the east. 

Plans show there will be two condos on each of the six floors over a ground-level garage and parking deck. The building will sit at the center of the site with a porte-cochère entrance, guest parking to the east and the pool and pool deck amenities to the west. The condo building includes a lobby with a concierge, trails, benches, a theater, club room and meeting room. Condos will feature a family room, kitchen, formal dining and a game room. Condos facing the east will include a spa gym component. 

“Although the zoning code allows us to have 18 units per acre, which yields to 45 units on the site, we are only proposing 12,” Harris told the DRB, noting that’s a two-third reduction from the Bahama Club.  

To provide a grand arrival experience, she said, the building will be set back 182 feet from the road, far exceeding the minimum 45 feet required, and the main entry doors will be flanked by inground reflective pools. Inside the arrival area, residents and visitors will have expansive views of the Gulf of Mexico. On the west will be a sunset garden that leads to a covered outdoor lounge area, a swimming pool with sun shelves and lap lanes, a fire pit, seating, a sunken lounge, cabanas and lawn seating. 

The building incorporates rime prevention through environmental design principles, especially around entryways. Access is controlled, blind spots were eliminated, and entryways are illuminated.  

Watts said there will be 18 species of trees — the largest that can be transported — for a “lush tropical feel.” The color palette, she said, is mostly greens, with white flowering plants, some sunset orange tones using bougainvillea and bird of paradise, along with purples and water features. 

DRB members praised the changes made since August.  

“It’s like having a park, a botanical garden in the front half of my property that I can enjoy and then reach out to the backside where I have a whole beach-resort kind of pool,” said DRB member, Sabrina McCabe, a landscape architect who praised the layers of color and texture.  

DRB member Doug Haughey, a Realtor, cited the flow of the landscaping styles, calling the rear area a “tropical oasis.” He commended the building’s unique architectural features, adding: “I wish more projects came to us that had as much thought in them as this does.”