"I take a neutral position because I have nostalgia for the old Florida," said longtime resident Terry Brown, who graduated high school the year the Ocean Club of Florida's original clubhouse went up. "This is the new Florida."
He was talking about the vote that Ocean Ridge's town commission took on June 1, when it unanimously approved plans to tear down the Ocean Club's clubhouse and replace it. It is the first time the club has rebuilt its main building since 1962, and the number that got the town talking wasn't the demolition. It was the price tag: an estimated $35 million for a building that will hold fewer people than the one coming down.
If you live in Ocean Ridge, a town of fewer than 2,000 residents where the Ocean Club has been the social hub for dining, swimming and tennis since town pioneers built it more than six decades ago, that trade is worth understanding. Not because most residents are club members. Because a $35 million construction project on North Ocean Boulevard is going to be part of the town's daily backdrop for the next two years, and the reason the new building seats fewer people than the old one has nothing to do with what the club wanted.
What's Actually Changing, in Numbers
The current clubhouse, renovated in 2006 for roughly $4 million, measures 17,240 square feet according to the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser and seats 192 people. The new building will be a two-story, 22,500-square-foot structure. It is larger by nearly a third. But it will seat only 180, a dozen fewer than today.
| Current clubhouse | New clubhouse | |
|---|---|---|
| Last major work | 2006 renovation ($4 million) | Planned rebuild |
| Size | 17,240 sq ft | 22,500 sq ft |
| Seating | 192 | 180 |
| Estimated cost | — | $35 million |
| Target completion | — | October 2028 |
The gap between a bigger building and a smaller dining room comes down to parking. To meet the town's parking requirements for the expanded footprint, the club had to give up seats it currently has. A resident scanning the headline number, thirty-five million dollars, might assume the club is building something more expansive for its members. The opposite is true for the room where people actually gather to eat.
The architecture is meant to read as a departure from anything else on that stretch of A1A. The project's architect described the design as a mix of island classical and Bermuda colonial, and town commissioners praised it for capturing what they called the character of Ocean Ridge, a town whose commercial footprint is small enough that a single private building can plausibly represent it.
Who Actually Voted on This
Here's the part of the story that's easy to miss if you only read the vote count. The commission's decision was unanimous, but Commissioner Ainar Aijala Jr. abstained because he sits on the Ocean Club's governing board. On the town's planning board, four of the five members who approved the building plans are themselves club members. One of them, vice chair Ken Kaleel, said the town attorney had cleared him to vote because he doesn't sit on the club's governing body.
None of this means the process was improper. Ocean Ridge is small enough that its civic bodies and its private clubs draw from the same short list of residents, and that overlap shows up whenever a project this size moves through town hall. Knowing that before a neighbor brings it up explains why the vote felt like a formality to some residents and like a conflict to others. The project itself had been in the works for about three years. A feasibility team was hired in 2023, and earlier this year the club put the rebuild to its own members. With most of them voting, 88 percent backed the plan before it ever reached the town commission.
What Stays Open While the Old Building Comes Down
If you live near the club or pass it on your way to the beach, here's what the next two years should actually look like. Construction isn't expected to start until spring 2027, with completion targeted for October 2028. There are no plans to close the club during that stretch. According to the project team, members will keep access to:
- The oceanfront kiddie and adult pools
- The deckside bar
- The cabanas
- A temporary tent for dining while the new dining room is built
So the disruption residents should expect isn't a shuttered building on North Ocean Boulevard for two years. It's a construction zone next to a beach club that keeps functioning around it, tent dining and all, until the new structure opens.
How It Stacks Up Against the County's Older Clubs
The Ocean Club likes to bill itself as storied, and for a town Ocean Ridge's size, it is. But it isn't the oldest private club on this stretch of coast, not by a wide margin. That distinction belongs to Gulf Stream Golf Club, which opened for play in 1924 with a course designed by Donald Ross and a clubhouse by Addison Mizner, two names that still carry weight in South Florida architecture nearly a century later.
Placed next to that, the Ocean Club's 1962 founding looks almost recent, and its 2028 rebuild fits a pattern rather than breaking one. Legacy clubs along this part of Palm Beach County tend not to stay frozen. They get renovated in 2006, then rebuilt entirely twenty years later, each time trying to hold onto whatever made the original feel like the town's own. Whether the new Ocean Club actually manages that, with a room for twelve fewer people than the one it replaces, is the kind of thing residents will be able to judge for themselves starting in the fall of 2028.
What This Means for a Resident's Next Two Summers
For anyone who doesn't hold a membership, the practical effects are modest. Expect construction traffic and equipment near North Ocean Boulevard once work begins in spring 2027. Expect the topic to keep coming up at town commission meetings as building plans move through their next approval stages, since the June 1 vote was a green light for the concept, not a final permit. And expect the finished building, when it opens in October 2028, to look distinctly different from the clubhouse that's stood there since the last renovation, a two-story structure in a style the town hasn't built at that scale before.
For members, the calculus is a little more personal. The club built by town pioneers in 1962 for dining, swimming and tennis is being replaced by a version of itself that costs roughly nine times what the last renovation cost and holds fewer people at the table. Whether that reads as an upgrade or a loss probably depends on how long you've been a member, which is exactly the split Terry Brown was describing when he called it old Florida meeting new Florida in the same building.
Ocean Ridge is a small enough town that a single construction project can become common knowledge before the first permit is pulled. This one will be visible from the road for the better part of two years, and the reasoning behind its smaller dining room is a detail worth having if the topic comes up at your own dinner table before the club's does.
If you're curious about what else is shifting in Ocean Ridge this year, from town projects to the market around them, Nestseekers Palm Beach keeps a close eye on this stretch of the coast and is always glad to talk through what's changing.
