Kensington Golf & Country Club

The honey sold in the Kensington golf shop comes from beehives kept on the course. The club also puts up bird boxes, and it reports bald eagles, ospreys and bobcats out among the holes. Those holes bend around a 20-acre preserve, a chain of wetlands and a cypress preserve. The architect's firm says the routing was deliberate: "We ultimately used the golf course as a buffer between the wetlands and homesites."

Indoors, the clubhouse reopened in January 2026 after a full renovation and expansion. The lobby looks straight through to the course. Past it you'll find redesigned dining rooms and a bar with seats inside and out, lounges set up for cards and small groups, and new locker rooms. Covered dining takes events of up to 330 guests. All of it sits on about 380 acres in North Naples, entered off Pine Ridge Road east of Airport-Pulling Road. The club opened in 1994 and is member-owned, and a full membership carries an equity stake and a vote.

Who designed the Kensington course, and can you walk it?

Robert Trent Jones Jr. designed the par-71 course that opened with the club in 1994, and he's renovated it twice since, in 2006 and in 2021. That second job regrassed the fairways with Bimini bermudagrass and the greens with TifEagle, put in drainage so the course plays firmer, added ribbon tees for new angles and rebuilt the bunkers. When the course reopened, the club said, "We are especially proud to complete this latest project with no incremental assessment." That remark covered the 2021 golf work and nothing that came after it.

Six sets of tees run from 4,834 to 6,757 yards, and waste areas of crushed coquina shell bracket several of the landing areas. The course is laid out so members can walk it.

The golf calendar has its own fixtures: a Club Championship, a President's Cup, the Kensington Cup, men's and ladies' invitationals and guest days, Nine & Dines and Guys & Dolls. A ladies' nine-hole group plays, and so do The Mulligans, who go out for three or four holes as beginners. For practice there's a range, putting greens and a separate spot for chipping and pitching, and the golf shop holds a TrackMan bay for lessons and club fitting.

What else is on the grounds besides golf?

Brighton Pointe, the outdoor restaurant and bar the club added in 2019, looks down the 18th hole and serves drinks, lunch and dinner. The pool deck and two lit bocce courts are right beside it. The saltwater pool was rebuilt during the renovation with a zero-entry edge, lap lanes, cabanas and sunshades. Each lounge chair has a flag for calling a server, and aqua aerobics meets three times a week.

Tennis is played on Har-Tru clay, and pickleball has courts of its own; the club lights all of them so play can carry on after dark. Weekly round robins, team matches, leagues, tournaments and clinics run through the season, with private and group lessons besides.

The fitness center is a small gym with Precor equipment, plus a Pilates studio and a room for group exercise. It's open from five in the morning until ten at night. Downstairs in the clubhouse, two massage rooms take appointments for 50- and 80-minute treatments.

Which clubs and evenings fill the Kensington calendar?

The club stages more than 100 events a year, and the ones it names as recurring include the Welcome Back Celebration, a Derby Party, Breakfast with the Bunny and Brunch with Santa. Between those come wine dinners, themed dinner nights and tribute band concerts.

Smaller groups keep their own schedules, with book clubs, mah jongg, bridge and canasta tables, an art guild, a wine club and cooking classes, and a walking and biking club that heads out around the grounds.

How long is the drive to Mercato, the beach and the airport?

Mercato is closest, about 6 miles and roughly 14 minutes by car without traffic. The rest, on the same terms:

• Vanderbilt Beach Park, about 7 miles and 16 minutes
• NCH Baker Hospital downtown, 8 miles and roughly 18 minutes
• Fifth Avenue South, about 9 miles and 19 minutes
• Naples Pier, about 9.5 miles and 21 minutes
• Southwest Florida International Airport, about 30 miles and 41 minutes

In season, traffic adds to all of these times.

Houses or low-rise homes: what sells at Kensington?

Kensington's housing comes in two forms, starting with detached houses in neighborhoods such as Canterbury Greens, Kensington Gardens, Knights Bridge, Sheffield Villas and Yorktown. Homes in low-rise buildings, none taller than three stories, are in Lancaster Square, Wellington Place, Westchester and Hamlet.

Homes run from about 1,750 to about 5,750 square feet, with 2 to 5 bedrooms. Those that change hands were built from 1994 into the early 2000s. They have sold from the $500,000s to around $3.5 million, and the two kinds overlap rather than splitting into tiers. The low-rise homes fill the lower part of that span and reach into the middle, and the detached houses start around the middle and carry the top.

Does buying a Kensington home make you a club member?

The club offers three kinds of membership. Full Golf covers the course and everything else. Sport covers the practice range, fitness center, pool, courts and dining all year, with golf on the course limited by season. Social takes in the clubhouse, pool, fitness center, courts and dining, and no golf at all. The membership page on the club's website describes all three as "Available to both residents and non-residents."

The community's master association is a separate organization from the club and runs its own website. Whether buying a home here obliges you to join, and what joining costs, belong with the club's membership office, settled before any offer goes in. Ask the association, separately, what it charges on the address you want.

Here's the awkward part: joining at Full Golf may mean queueing. Kensington's brochure carries a Golf Waitlist category, with no published length. When eighteen holes on the Jones course are why you'd move here, that queue can outweigh anything about the house.