A traveler's guide toNaples, Florida.

When to go

The dry season is the season. From December to April the air is warm, the humidity is gone, and the rain more or less stops; this is when Naples fills, when the restaurants on Fifth Avenue South need booking, and when the town earns its reputation. It is also the busiest stretch of the year, and the roads and tee times show it.

Summer is the other Naples: hot, green, and emptier than the postcard months. The rhythm is fixed: a bright morning, a towering afternoon thunderstorm that arrives and leaves inside an hour, and a washed evening sky that produces the best sunsets of the year. The Gulf reaches its warmest, and a house with a pool, a lanai and a summer kitchen is built for exactly this cadence.

October and November are the quiet compromise: the storms taper off, the water is still warm, and the season's crowds have not yet arrived. May holds the same bargain at the other end.

The sunset, and how the town faces it

Almost nowhere else on the American mainland does a resort coast face due west over open water. In Naples the sunset is not scenery, it is the appointment: the pier fills for it, dinners are timed against it, and the best addresses in town are the ones whose lanais point straight at it.

It rewards planning less than presence. The color starts perhaps twenty minutes after the sun touches the water, and the summer storm season, for all its afternoon noise, clears the sky for the most extravagant skies of the year. Watch it from the sand once, and from a west-facing pool deck every other night.

The water, and what is behind the town

The Gulf here is calm, shallow and warm for most of the year, which makes it a swimming and boating coast rather than a surfing one. South of Port Royal the coast dissolves into Keewaydin Island and the Ten Thousand Islands, reachable only by boat, where the shelling is the best in the region and the beaches are empty on a weekday.

Behind the town, the Everglades begin. Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary's boardwalk through old-growth cypress is an hour well spent, and an airboat or a guide will take you deeper. It is a strange and excellent property of Naples that the manicured and the primordial sit fifteen minutes apart.

Where to stay

Old Naples, the walkable grid behind the pier, puts you close to Fifth Avenue South and Third Street South and their restaurants. The beachfront north of it runs to towers and hotels. Port Royal, south of the old town, is the estate district: wide Gulf-front lots, deep privacy, and the western exposure that the whole coast turns on.

Off Grid's residence sits on the Gulf at Port Royal: single-story pavilions of limestone and glass around a resort-scale pool, a deep lanai with a summer kitchen, and a beach that functions as the front yard. It faces due west, because in Naples that is the entire point.