In Hampton Point, the Golf Course Is Closing Its Gates. The Marina Isn't.

Drive to the end of Hampton Point Drive this month and you will pass two very different kinds of closed. The golf course is wrapped in orange construction fencing, its fairways stripped down to bare sand in places, a reshaped green catching afternoon light where the old third hole used to sit. A quarter mile further, past the same live oaks, the marina is doing exactly what it has done for years: boats backing off trailers, a dock hand coiling line, the ferry to Little St. Simons Island loading its afternoon group.

Same neighborhood, same canopy, same stretch of marsh. One gate is being built. The other one was never there to begin with.

What's Actually Closing

The King and Prince Golf Club, the course that has anchored the north end of St. Simons Island since 1989 and that longtime members still call by its older name, Home of the Hampton Club, has been closed for construction since the renovation broke ground this year. Owner South Street Partners, the Charlotte and Charleston-based firm behind Kiawah Island and Palmetto Bluff, brought in golf course architect Beau Welling to rebuild it from the ground up, and the work is now visibly in its final stretch ahead of a targeted November 2026 opening.

The changes on the ground are specific enough to matter to anyone who plays or simply drives past:

• Irrigated turf is being cut by roughly 20 percent, a water-use decision that also opens up long sightlines across the marsh that the old maintained footprint used to block
• The par-5 third hole has a recontoured green pushed back 17 yards, with a new ridge running through the putting surface
• The clubhouse is being rebuilt around a new club room, an outdoor terrace for covered dining, and a halfway house designed as a gathering spot rather than a snack window
• MacCurrach Golf is handling construction, with Welling and senior associate Chase Webb making regular site visits to check the work against the original plan

None of this is cosmetic. It is a full reroute of how the course uses its own land, built around the same live oaks and the same par-72 routing that has always wound past Butler Lake.

The Access Model Underneath the Turf

The more consequential change for anyone living nearby is not the bunkering. It is who gets to walk through the gate once the bunkering is finished.

For decades, The King and Prince operated as a semi-private resort course. You could book a public tee time, guest at the hotel, or play as a member. That model ends with this renovation. In May 2026, the club launched a new membership program alongside the construction, marking what South Street describes as a full transition to a private club structure. Reserve a tee time the way you used to, and after November, you no longer can.

South Street managing partner Chris Randolph framed the shift as a deliberate repositioning rather than a simple upgrade, saying the company wanted to create a club that feels "elevated and approachable" while delivering "a best-in-class member experience." Whether that reads as good news or as one more door closing depends entirely on which side of the membership list a given household lands on.

For a neighborhood where the golf course has functioned as a shared backdrop for thirty-some years, semi-private to invitation-only is not a small adjustment. It is the difference between a course you could walk onto with a credit card and a course you now need a name on a list to reach.

The Marina Nobody's Gating

Walk or drive the other direction from the same intersection and the story reverses completely.

Hampton River Marina, at 1000 Hampton River Club Marina Drive, has not changed its access model at all. It remains a working, public-facing marina: wet slips, dry stack storage, a fuel dock, a ship's store, bait for sale, general repair services, and boat rentals available to anyone who calls ahead. The marina monitors VHF Channel 71 and sits close enough to the Intracoastal Waterway that boaters navigating up from the sound use it as a landmark, roughly 2.9 miles in from open water.

It is also, and has been for years, the only departure point for the ferry to Little St. Simons Island, the 11,000-acre barrier island that has been privately held by the Berolzheimer family since 1760. That ferry runs on a reservation system of its own, open only to guests booked at the island's lodge or on a scheduled day trip, not to walk-up visitors. But that restriction belongs to the island, not to the marina itself. The dock, the launch ramp, the dry stack yard, all of it stays open to the boating public the same way it always has.

Put those two rows side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. One amenity at the north end of the island is narrowing who can use it. The other has no reason to.

What Residents Will Actually Notice This Fall

If you live on this end of St. Simons, the practical version of all this shows up in small ways before it shows up in any headline. The construction fencing along the course will likely start coming down as November approaches, replaced eventually by whatever gate or gatehouse a private club chooses to mark its new boundary. The deer that have always treated this stretch of the island as their own will keep doing exactly that, construction or not, since nothing about turf reduction or clubhouse renovation touches the maritime forest they move through.

Down at the marina, the rhythm holds. Boats will keep launching. The ferry will keep leaving for Little St. Simons on its own schedule, watched over by ospreys and the occasional bald eagle working the marsh edges the same way they have for as long as anyone here can remember. The ICW traffic will keep passing the mouth of the Hampton River without any of it caring whether a golf membership list exists a half mile inland.

The honest way to describe Hampton Point this fall is not that it is changing. It is that one piece of shared infrastructure is being reserved for a smaller group of people while the piece that actually defines the neighborhood, the water, stays exactly as open as it was.

That is worth knowing whether you play golf or not. It tells you something true about which parts of this place are being managed as a private product and which parts remain, by accident of geography and ownership, a public good.

If you are watching this stretch of the island for other reasons, whether that is a future home search, a question about a specific street, or just curiosity about what a renovation like this tends to do to a neighborhood's character over time, the Angela Harrison Team knows this ground well enough to talk it through candidly. Reach out when you are ready for that conversation.