After FOD Capital developed The Perry Hotel & Marina in Key West, the family investment office had no set plans to develop another one.
At least not until it was approached by a landowner in north Naples looking to build a hotel on their property.
“The owner of the parcel actually came down to Key West, fell in love with The Perry Hotel, and turned away, we’re told, a few other flags…and said I want you guys to come and put The Perry up on this property that I’ve got,” says Michael Raymond, CEO of Key West-based FOD Capital, which has invested in a variety of entities, from an infertility treatment business to an all-terrain vehicle company.
He and his firm began researching the Naples area and conducted a market feasibility study. They liked what they saw. “We really got excited about the location,” says Raymond, 69. “The market demographics and the hospitality market in Naples are extremely strong.”
So The Perry Hotel Naples was a go. A FOD Capital entity, FOD Perry Naples LLC, bought the 6.3-acre site for the hotel, 805 Walkerbilt Road, from Bay House Campus LLC for $4.8 million in August 2021, Collier County property records show. The mailing address for Bay House Campus is the same as the Bellasera Hotel in Naples, and the LLC’s manager, according to the Florida Division of Corporations website, is Edward Negley, who is co-owner of the Bellasera, among other hospitality entities.
Construction, meanwhile, commenced about a year ago, and the $80 million hotel project on the Cocohatchee River in north Naples is anticipating a fall 2024 opening.
Raymond knew he already had a successful template from which to work. “I’m a firm believer in, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he says. “So we went with a lot of the same design team and construction team that we had for The Perry in Key West.”
That included Marino Construction Group out of Key West and the Fort Lauderdale-area design firm Casa Conde & Associates. “We tried to get some economies of scale in what we learned with the first Perry,” says Raymond. “So you’ll see a lot of the room design and the lobby design elements are sort of carried over. It was part replication of what worked in Key West, and part creativity and some new designs.”
The 160-room, seven-floor hotel features a modern industrial look, where rustic materials like stone and exposed brick are mixed with industrial elements like steel beams and metal chandeliers. Most of the guest rooms and suites will have balconies, and a seventh-floor pool and Asian fusion restaurant called Tigress should be especially appealing around sunset.
Back on ground level, there will be another pool with a poolside eatery, activity lawn, lobby coffee bar and a boardwalk through the mangroves to the hotel’s eight-slip marina and dock, which has direct access to the Gulf of Mexico. A regularly scheduled shuttle will take guests to nearby beaches, and fishing trips, dolphin and sunset cruises and other watersports activities will also depart from the dock.
The hotel’s unique riverfront location should serve as a selling point. “The resort itself is designed to be sort of a destination resort,” says Raymond. “We’re pretty confident that once people come and experience the restaurant and the rooftop bar and pool, that that’s going to be a magnet for people to make repeat visits.”
A yet-to-be-announced chef who’s appeared on TV shows such as “Top Chef,” “Chopped,” and “Iron Chef America” is partnering with the hotel on the menu for Tigress. “He helped us design the menu and is going to help us execute on it,” says Raymond. “We’re really excited about that.”
Raymond envisions the restaurant drawing in not only hotel guests but also residents in the surrounding area. “By having a restaurant of this caliber, we think we’ll be able to develop a regular clientele in the offseason,” he says.
Family, business and leisure travelers will all be target demographics for the hotel. “We’re sort of in that premium to super-premium category; call it a four-and-a-half-star type of quality experience,” says Raymond. “If you look at the Naples market, you’ll see a lot of more aged three and a half to four star [properties], and then of course you’ve got The Ritz and a few other premium properties. We’re not trying to compete with them, certainly, for corporate events and the like. But we’re in that more affordable yet premium, quality, experiential space.”
While it was easy to lock in a construction and design team for the project, lining up the needed trades was more challenging. Especially in Southwest Florida, where recovery from 2022’s Hurricane Ian continues.
“A lot of the trades are just swimming in work,” says Raymond. “They’re a little more selective in the jobs they take on. So bidding was a little more challenging than it might be in a sort of normalized climate, but we were successful in getting everything within our budget.”
When it comes to hiring for the staff of 100-plus that will be needed for the hotel, it’s been a different story. “It’s actually been kind of a pleasant surprise,” says Raymond. “I think a lot of people like to be engaged and associated with a new exciting project like this. And people that might not be inclined to, say, move from one older hospitality venue to another are looking at this and going, ‘Wow, this is really cool and exciting.’ They’re giving us a fresh look, and once they do that, we’ve got them.”
Could there be more Perry Hotels down the road? “Well, I’ll never say never,” says Raymond. “We were perfectly happy with the original Perry hotel. Then this invitation came, and we really got intoxicated with the strength of the Naples hospitality market. The hypothesis sort of proved itself for us, and it was hard to say no.
“Whether we replicate this in other venues, it’s difficult to say at this point,” he continues. “We’re pretty focused on this, and we’re pretty confident that we’re going to knock it out of the park with this venue.”
