Walk Royal Poinciana Way on an August evening and you will hear live jazz spilling out of a courtyard that spent decades dark before this year's reopening. You will see a line for espresso at a thrift shop counter. You will pass a 24,000-square-foot theater with a glass wall looking out over the Intracoastal, showing a Disney movie to families who never left town for the summer. None of this fits the version of Palm Beach summer that longtime residents grew up with, the one where the shutters go up on Worth Avenue and the island empties until the first cold front up north sends everyone back.
That version isn't wrong exactly. It's just being actively rewritten, on purpose, a few blocks from where most of us park for dinner.
The Playhouse That Went Dark for Sixty Years Is Talking Again
The building at the center of this is the old Royal Poinciana Playhouse, a 1958 John Volk design that anchored the plaza's social life for decades before falling silent. It has now reopened as Glazer Hall, described by its own team as Palm Beach's first nonprofit performing arts center in over 60 years. The renovation kept the Regency-style bones and the sweeping Intracoastal views but rebuilt the inside into a 400-seat theater with a glass back wall, retractable seating, and the kind of sound and lighting rig you'd expect from a much bigger city.
What's actually running on that stage this summer tells you who the venue is built for. The Andrew Henley Sullivan Family Film Series runs monthly, and each screening gets two showings: a 9:30 a.m. sensory-friendly version with reduced audio and dimmed rather than darkened lights, followed by a traditional noon screening. Zootopia gets that treatment on Sunday, August 30, with a 10 a.m. sensory-friendly show and a 12:30 p.m. traditional one. That's not a tourist-season booking. That's a venue solving for the families who are here on a Tuesday in August and will still be here in October.
The adult side of the calendar has had real teeth too. A screening of Ron Delsener Presents, the documentary on the concert promoter behind decades of Hendrix-to-Springsteen bookings, came with a post-film Q&A featuring director Jake Sumner and music supervisor Randall Poster. The Birdcage got a 30th-anniversary screening with commentary from film critic Leonard Maltin. This is programming built for people who live here year-round and want something to do on a weeknight, not a summer skeleton crew waiting for season to start again in November.
The Island's First Waterfront Restaurant Opened This Past January
Here's the fact that should reframe how you think about the Playhouse project: the Town of Palm Beach had never had a restaurant directly on the Intracoastal until this year. Tutto Mare, from the husband-and-wife team behind the Hamptons' Tutto il Giorno restaurants, opened on January 2, 2026, inside the old Playhouse building, and it is described in the Royal Poinciana Plaza's own opening announcement as the Town's first and only Intracoastal waterfront restaurant. Two hundred seats, a private dining room, two wine rooms, and a 1,200-square-foot terrace looking straight out over Lake Worth Lagoon and the Palm Harbor Marina.
The room itself carries history most diners don't clock on their way to a table. Tutto Mare occupies what was once the Playhouse's Celebrity Room, and the restoration brought back a 1950s ceiling mural called Venetian Festival, painted by New York artist Robert Bushnell, with caricatures of more than 100 celebrities who used to frequent the room, Clark Gable among them.
Co-owner Gabby Karan de Felice, who designed the space with her husband and chef Gianpaolo de Felice, described the goal in a piece published by WS Development: guests kept asking how she'd gotten the notoriously homebound Palm Beach crowd to actually leave their houses for dinner. Her answer was that the room feels warm and unpretentious, candles and flowers and a water view instead of a scene built around being seen. If that pitch works on a Tuesday in August rather than a Saturday in February, it says something about which residents this restaurant was actually built to serve.
The Plaza Picked a Fight With Its Own Reputation
None of this is incidental. The Royal Poinciana Plaza has given its entire summer a name: The Royal Riviera, a property-wide platform running July through September 2026 that ties together tenant openings, dining, and on-site programming under one idea, borrowed from the Italian for without hurry.
Summer in Palm Beach has always been called the slow season. This year, we are changing that narrative. It is not slow.
That's the plaza's own language, and it's a direct argument with decades of local assumption. The programming behind it includes morning coffee rituals in the courtyard, evening film screenings at Glazer Hall, and live jazz every Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m. None of it is aimed at winter visitors, because winter visitors aren't here yet. It's aimed at the people who are.
That's worth sitting with for a second. The traditional Palm Beach season runs roughly November through April, built around a population that mostly isn't in residence the rest of the year. A developer choosing to program hard through July, August, and September is making a bet on the people who stay through the heat, the full-time residents, the second-home owners who use the island as an actual home rather than a four-month perch. Betting real programming dollars on that group, rather than treating summer as a placeholder until season returns, is a different read on who the island's core customer actually is.
The Retail Side Is Making the Same Bet
The tenant mix backs this up. Bottega Veneta opened a nearly 3,000-square-foot boutique at the plaza this year, its first Florida location to carry the brand's fine jewelry collection alongside ready-to-wear and leather goods. That's not a seasonal pop-up. That's a full-format flagship commitment to a market the brand expects to perform in August as well as January.
Smaller but just as telling: the Church Mouse, Palm Beach's longtime thrift shop, added a grab-and-go coffee counter serving Pumphouse Coffee Roasters, a West Palm Beach roaster, with proceeds supporting Bethesda-by-the-Sea's charitable outreach. It's a small addition, but it's the kind of daily-habit fixture that only makes sense if the people running the shop expect a real customer base walking through in the off-season, not a shuttered storefront waiting for November.
What This Actually Changes If You Live Here
If you've spent past Augusts assuming there was nothing to do within walking distance of Cocoanut Row, that assumption is now out of date. Thursday jazz runs through September. The family film series has another screening before the summer's out. Tutto Mare is open seven nights a week with last seating at 9:30 p.m., a fact that would have been meaningless a year ago because there was nowhere on the island to book a waterfront dinner in the first place.
None of this is about whether Palm Beach is a good place to buy or sell. It's about whether the place you already live has changed underneath you this year, and it has. The building that sat dark for sixty years is running a jazz series and a family film program. The stretch of shoreline that never had a public restaurant now has one people fly in for. Whether that pattern holds past this first Royal Riviera summer is worth watching, but for now, the slow season on Palm Beach Island has a real competitor for the first time in a long while.
If you want an unvarnished, ground-level read on how the island's day-to-day is shifting, or what it might eventually mean for property values along this stretch, Palm Beach Residential has been watching this market for over four decades. List With Cappy when you're ready to talk. Until then, grab a table at Tutto Mare and see the mural for yourself.
