If you've been telling yourself the Pebble Beach renovation is behind you, you're only half right. The Lodge is done: Stillwater, The Tap Room, and The Bench are all back, refreshed, and full most evenings. But walk two minutes north along 17-Mile Drive and you'll find The Links at Spanish Bay still torn open, mid-transformation, with roughly eight months left before anyone plays a shot on it. This has been one long construction project wearing two different faces, and late August 2026 finds Pebble Beach standing squarely in the gap between them.
That distinction matters if you live here, because the two projects have produced two very different kinds of disruption, and conflating them means missing what's actually changed and what never did.
The Lodge Came Back in Stages, Not All at Once
The interior overhaul at The Lodge began the day after Rory McIlroy won the 2025 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and Pebble Beach Company didn't reopen everything at once. It brought the rooms back one at a time, in an order that tells you something about what mattered most to get right first:
- The Bench, the wood-fired restaurant overlooking the 18th hole, reopened around June 2025, access shifted temporarily to the course side of the building while work continued elsewhere.
- The Tap Room came back in October 2025 with its deep green leather booths intact and an expanded collection of historic golf memorabilia on display. During construction, it had spent time relocated to a Fairway One space, its footprint reduced again around Car Week in August 2025, before settling into its finished room that fall.
- Stillwater, the flagship, was last to return, reopening in November 2025 with a wraparound dining room, floor-to-ceiling windows, a central bar facing the Pacific, and a glass-enclosed wine room. Chef de cuisine Alex Ramirez and executive chef Benjamin Brown rebuilt the menu around Monterey Peninsula farms and fisheries, from a charred hamachi tostada to a whole roasted branzino.
In between, dinner in the heart of Pebble Beach got genuinely tricky. With Stillwater and The Bench both out of commission for stretches, Gallery Cafe, the breakfast-and-lunch spot tucked above the shops across from The Lodge at 1700 17-Mile Drive, quietly started serving dinner. Its menu borrowed dishes straight off Stillwater's old lineup, including a seafood bolognese, plated in a room dressed for pancakes and burgers. It was an odd stopgap and, for a few months, one of the only reliable dinner reservations near the 18th green.
As Pebble Beach Company CEO David Stivers put it when Stillwater finally reopened, the moment marked "the culmination of The Lodge's transformation." The lobby itself changed too, in two stages. The once-quiet, formal room overlooking Stillwater Cove had already added a permanent marble, brass, and walnut bar back in 2024. The 2025 renovation expanded the space again, giving the Terrace Lounge a larger footprint and greater capacity than before, along with live music in the evenings and a menu of shared plates from Stillwater's kitchen.
What "Spanish Bay Is Closed" Actually Leaves Open
Here's where the confusion sets in for a lot of residents. The Links at Spanish Bay played its final round on March 17, 2026, and closed the next day for a full redesign led by golf architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. It won't reopen to the public until April 17, 2027, timed just ahead of the 127th U.S. Open at Pebble Beach Golf Links that June.
That's a real, extended closure. But it's a closure of the golf course specifically, not the address. The Inn at Spanish Bay, the hotel that sits beside the course, has stayed open the entire time. So has the seaside boardwalk, which was rebuilt after storm damage in a separate project that began in spring 2025 and provides the public coastal access between the golf course and the beach. So has the evening ritual most people actually associate with the place: the bagpiper who plays at the Spanish Bay fire pits Thursday through Saturday as the sun goes down. None of it depends on the fairways being playable.
What's gone, for now, is the golf itself, and Hanse's plans make clear why it's taking a full year. The redesign relocates several green sites, including the current 14th and 18th, to make room for an entirely new par-3. Forward tees will end up roughly 500 yards shorter, championship tees about 375 yards longer, and the par will drop from 72 to 71. The project also adds new drainage and irrigation, cuts irrigated turf by 12 percent, and adds three more acres of environmental habitat. Hanse has described the site itself as one of the best he's ever worked with for golf, calling it a place where "all your senses are stimulated by the crashing Pacific surf."
Where the Golf Actually Went
For anyone still trying to get a round in this fall, Spyglass Hill and Del Monte Golf Course have absorbed the overflow, alongside additional availability at Pebble Beach Golf Links itself. None of this is a secret workaround. Pebble Beach Company has been steering golfers toward those courses directly since the closure began, and both remain fully open through the redesign.
The bigger picture is that Spanish Bay has always been considered the third course at the resort, trailing Pebble Beach Golf Links and Spyglass Hill in reputation since it opened in 1987. The redesign is explicitly meant to close that gap, not just repair storm damage or refresh finishes the way the Lodge project did. It's a more ambitious undertaking, which is part of why it runs longer.
A Two-Year Arc, Viewed From Here
Line the two projects up and the shape of the last eighteen months becomes clearer. The Lodge renovation ran from February 2025 through November 2025, roughly nine months. The Spanish Bay redesign runs from March 2026 through April 2027, more than a year. Together, they span from the moment McIlroy won his Pro-Am to a few months before the resort hosts a U.S. Open, nearly a continuous stretch of active construction somewhere on the property.
If you live in Pebble Beach, you've effectively spent the better part of two years inside that perimeter, watching one part of the resort come back into focus just as another part goes dark. Right now, in late August 2026, the Lodge side of that arc is finished and, by most accounts, better than it's been in decades. The Spanish Bay side still has roughly eight months to go, with the next real marker being that April 17, 2027 public opening, just ahead of the U.S. Open's return to Pebble Beach Golf Links for a seventh time.
Knowing which project you're actually navigating on a given evening, whether it's the finished Lodge or the still-unfinished course next door, is the difference between showing up to Stillwater expecting construction dust and discovering it's been open and full since November, or wondering why the fairways at Spanish Bay look nothing like the postcard while the bagpiper plays on schedule fifty yards away.
For those weighing a longer stay on the Peninsula while this second act plays out, whether to watch the Spanish Bay transformation up close or simply to have a home base with a proper kitchen instead of another hotel dining room, Tim Allen Luxury Rentals manages a curated set of estate-scale and oceanfront properties across Pebble Beach and the surrounding coast. Get in touch with our Luxury Rentals concierge to find a stay that fits the season you're actually here for.
