Drive down Belvedere Road where it meets South Dixie Highway, on the edge of El Cid, and you will find the same thing you would have found a year ago: a chain-link perimeter around a low white colonial-revival building, a cupola on the roof that nods to Mount Vernon, and no clear sign of who is working inside on any given week. Neighbors have learned to read the fence the way sailors read cloud cover. Fresh scaffolding means something. A quiet week means something else. For nearly two years, the read has mostly been the same: this thing is stuck.
That read is wrong, or at least incomplete. What is actually happening at 320 Belvedere Road is not a project that stalled out. It is a project where the ownership never moved, the price of getting in never dropped, and the visible turmoil, lawsuits included, has come almost entirely from the vendor layer rather than the foundation underneath it. If you live in El Cid and have been treating this building as a cautionary tale, the record says otherwise.
Three Fall Seasons, Three Different Answers
The club behind the fence is Biba Social, a members-only social club and small hotel that has now missed its own opening date three times.
| Target Opening | When It Was Set | What Happened Instead |
|---|---|---|
| Fall 2024 | Original marketing timeline | Construction continued; the date was dropped without fanfare |
| Fall 2025 | Revised timeline set in early 2025 | Contractor and hospitality consultant both changed mid-year |
| Early 2026 | Set in late 2025 for the start of winter season | Two lawsuits filed against the parent company in January and February 2026 |
| Fall 2026 | Current target, confirmed on the club's own careers page | Still the stated goal as of this writing |
Managing director Anne-Marie Houston put it plainly earlier this year, saying only that construction was taking longer than expected and that there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes. That is not the language of a project in crisis. It is the language of an interior restoration that keeps running longer than the schedule allows, which happens constantly with 1930s buildings and rarely makes headlines the way a lawsuit does.
What the Chain Link Is Actually Guarding
The building itself is worth remembering, because it predates every version of this drama by nearly ninety years. It opened in 1938 as the Mount Vernon Motor Lodge, designed by society architect Belford Shoumate, who borrowed enough from George Washington's home to justify the name: a columned porch, sidelights at the front door, and that cupola. It became Hotel Biba during a 2000 renovation and ran as a boutique property, at one point earning distinction as the first hotel in West Palm Beach certified green by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, before falling into disuse in the years before its 2020 sale.
Elizabeth Rad, operating through an entity called Royal Palm WPB Hospitality, bought the roughly one-acre property in late 2020 for $4.5 million. The city's Historic Preservation Board approved renovation plans in April 2022, at an estimated cost near $35 million, a scope well beyond a simple refresh. The new design cuts the room count from 44 down to 26, nine of them suites, a reduction the city's historic preservation planner said at the time would actually benefit the surrounding El Cid streets, which share limited on-street parking with the businesses along South Dixie Highway. Fewer rooms means fewer cars on a block that was never built for a 44-key hotel to begin with.
The Lawsuit Was a Family Matter, Not a Bank Pulling Out
The detail that generated the most alarm this year was a $2.5 million foreclosure suit filed on January 29, 2026, against Royal Palm WPB Hospitality. It sounds, on its face, like exactly the kind of filing that precedes a project collapsing. It is worth reading the plaintiff's name before drawing that conclusion: the suit was brought by Davar Rad, as trustee of the Davar Rad Revocable Trust. This is not an outside lender calling a loan. It is a dispute that appears to sit inside the ownership's own family structure, and Elizabeth Rad has said the filing was made in error. The suit was subsequently withdrawn.
A second, unrelated complaint remains outstanding. Barrel Aged Mgmt LLC, the Miami hospitality firm that had been advising the club through much of 2025, filed suit on February 4, 2026, claiming it was owed $39,500 in unpaid consulting fees dating back to November 2025. That is a vendor payment dispute, the kind that shows up constantly on large renovation jobs when a consulting relationship ends. It is not evidence that the ownership entity is out of money. Taken together, the two suits describe friction at the edges of the project, not a hole in its center.
The Names Changed. The Owner Didn't.
Part of what has made Biba Social hard to track from the outside is how many names have rotated through it. DC Green of Palm Beach Gardens was the general contractor as of early 2025. Mercurio Construction LLC of North Palm Beach has since taken over that role. On the hospitality side, New York-based Apicii came on as a consultant in early 2025, only to be replaced by September of that year by Barrel Aged, the same firm now suing over unpaid fees.
What has not changed through any of this is who owns the building. Every version of the club, every contractor, every consultant has operated under Royal Palm WPB Hospitality and Elizabeth Rad, who also runs Corrado Properties, the Palm Beach-based firm behind other boutique properties including the Sorrel River Ranch Resort and Spa in Moab, Utah. Turnover among contractors and consultants on a $35 million historic renovation is closer to routine than remarkable. Turnover at the ownership level would be the real signal, and there has not been any.
Membership Price Went Up During All of This
Here is the detail that argues most strongly against the failure narrative. Biba Social's membership fee was originally set at $50,000 per member. Through three missed opening dates, two lawsuits, and multiple staffing changes, that price has not dropped. By most accounts it has climbed. Some early members reportedly asked for refunds out of frustration with the delays, and some received them, but the club has not needed to discount its way back into demand. A project genuinely running out of runway drops its price to keep cash moving. This one has not had to.
Every Address Chasing the Same Circle
Biba Social is also not the only private club under construction in West Palm Beach right now, which puts its timeline in useful perspective. The Bellini Rooftop Lounge is set to open in late 2027 inside the 27-story Mr. C Hotel & Residences on Lakeview Avenue, a project from Terra Group and the Morrison family working with members of the Cipriani family. Separately, Related Ross has partnered with Leisure Resorts LLC of Hartford, Connecticut, on a private club planned next to the Palm Harbor Marina along North Flagler Drive. West Palm Beach's newly affluent population has created real appetite for exclusive gathering spaces, and every one of these projects is competing for the same small pool of contractors, consultants, and eventual members. A multi-year build is the norm for this category right now, not a warning sign specific to the building on Belvedere Road.
What Finally Opens on Belvedere Road
When it does open, the finished club will include a hotel of 26 rooms and suites, a rooftop cigar lounge, a poolside bar, and a cocktail lounge, along with two restaurants. The headline tenant is MayaBay, a Thai-Japanese restaurant group based in Monaco making its first appearance in the United States inside Biba Social. A second, still-unnamed restaurant is planned with a small formal dining room and outdoor seating. The design work comes from Major Studio, which has described the goal as blending old-world leisure with the neighborhood it sits in, a description that matches the building's Mediterranean and colonial-revival surroundings rather than fighting them.
Next door, longtime resident Irma Hale, who owns the single-family home directly beside the property, has spent this same stretch converting part of her own 1925 house into a small museum honoring her late father, sculptor Reuben Hale. She has said she expects her museum and the restored hotel to complement each other once both are finished. It is a small reminder that the block was never just waiting on one building. It was building alongside it.
For residents wondering how to actually track progress instead of guessing from the fence line, the meaningful markers are not another glossy rendering or a press quote about optimism. They are a certificate of occupancy filed with the city, visible staffing at the property, or a hard date issued by the club itself rather than described as a target. Until one of those appears, the building will keep looking the same from the street. That does not mean it is standing still behind the fence.
El Cid has absorbed a century of change without losing the texture that makes it worth walking through, from its Mediterranean Revival rooflines to whatever finally opens at 320 Belvedere Road. If you are curious about what a building's history says about its neighborhood, or what a listing near the Intracoastal is actually worth once you look past the headline price, Elizabeth DeWoody has spent years reading exactly these signals on Palm Beach Island and the surrounding coastal corridor. Explore more of what makes this pocket of West Palm Beach distinct on the El Cid neighborhood guide, or reach out directly when you are ready to talk about what is actually happening on your own street.
