For a time, the future of the Sandpiper Resort, 4500 SE Pine Valley St. in southeast Port St. Lucie, seemed uncertain: from Club Med abandoning the 216-acre historic property in late 2022 to a prolonged series of acquisitions.
Rest easy: The resort has new life due to a $50 million restoration still in progress since 2025, bringing modern luxury to a vaunted destination along the St. Lucie River.
The All-Inclusive Sandpiper Resort, now minted under the voco brand – a subsidiary of hospitality conglomerate InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) – has slowly begun reopening since Jan. 7.
The Sandpiper resort’s soft reopening saw staff give several press tours of the property on Jan. 10 and Jan. 14 led by Miranda Allison, the resort’s marketing manager since February 2024.
Efforts to trot out voco Sandpiper to the public will also include a larger “grand opening” to take place at an undetermined time, Allison said Jan. 14.
At press time, two guest buildings with 100 out of the 335 rooms held over from the resort’s Club Med ownership are open to visitors, according to Allison. The remaining rooms, situated across three more guest buildings, will begin to open in a “phased approach” around mid-2026. Sandpiper intends to open 249 rooms by year’s end.
Each of these rooms carries a more vibrant, minimalistic tone with décor indicative of the trendiest hotels. “We went for a much lighter and brighter design than we had previously,” Allison said.
Reopening Sandpiper brings with it another labor market to pair with tourism in eastern Port St. Lucie alongside newer attractions like The Port District. The resort is expected to generate approximately 100 more jobs atop the 100 staff currently available, said Kara Rosner, a spokesperson with Diamond Public Relations of Miami.
Much of the staff – between hospitality and groundskeeping – was brought on through job fairs held months before in Port St. Lucie and throughout the Treasure Coast “We had a lot of local hirings,” Allison said.
New additions the voco brand installed throughout the concourse include three new pools for children and adults alike; a video arcade; tennis/pickleball courts; a mini golf course; and eateries aplenty.
Smaller scale cuisine was represented by at least two cargo container food stands yet to open: Lucie’s, for American fast-casual favorites; and Solara, for more refined seafood on the go. Two larger hubs surround the communal pool: Match Point, a sports pub; and the Riverside Market, a prix fixe buffet helmed by Michelin-starred chef Mark Jones, who moved to Stuart after preparing meals at Google’s European headquarters in his native Dublin.
Two more restaurants currently under construction will join Riverside Market specializing in Italian and Asian cuisine, Jones said while leading a tour through the culinary hub.
Jones directed guests, with dry Irish humor, to a lunch of American comfort food; finer carved meats and choice sundry sides. “We want you to be able to beeline it to a specific area to where the meat is paired with a meat, a starch, a vegetable and a sauce.”
Currently, Riverside offers a range of 1,173 dishes all using ingredients mostly provided from local farms, according to Jones. “It gets more of the chefs institutionalized in the sense of learning how to use what is in season and what is not.”
While it offers boating and recreational vehicle access along the St. Lucie River, voco Sandpiper also advertises its own eco-friendly amenities. This entails a partnership, according to Allison, with the MANG Foundation, a nonprofit spun off of the MANG Apparel brand based in West Palm Beach. Their website says volunteers in the nonprofit planted over 833,000 mangroves in Florida since 2015.
Representatives from MANG did not reply for comment by press time.
“The property added about 35,000 plants in the last month-and-a-half,” said Allison. Most of these plants could be found among the resort’s landscaping, such as an aging banyan tree in the water decorated with candles in mason jars. In addition, some of the staff, said Rosner, engaged in an on-site “green team,” a “cross-departmental effort that has worked on projects,” including the use of compostable and sustainable consumer products on-site; and the recycling of water through vaporization into reused aluminum bottles.
All these factors could prove advantageous to bring tourism in eastern Port St. Lucie, said Marika Sexton, the resort’s manager. The resort now goes forward with funding from a shell company co-managed by Feenix Venture Partners of New York and Ghost Tree Partners of Irvine, Calif.
Sexton’s hope is that IHG’s oversight will bring newer successes to Sandpiper after Club Med abandoned the site in September 2022. “We have a lot of comments from our locals within the community that they’re really ready to get back to Sandpiper,” Sexton said.