A Cuban cafe, a Shake Shack, two national furniture anchors and a 61-acre apartment-and-retail parcel are all landing on Alico Road within roughly the same eighteen-month window. The four-lane extension meant to pull some of that traffic off Alico Road and onto a parallel route won't be finished until spring 2028. For anyone who lives at Esplanade Lake Club and treats Alico Road as the only way in or out, that gap between commercial arrivals and road capacity is worth understanding now, before it shows up as ten extra minutes at the light near Ben Hill Griffin Parkway.
Esplanade Lake Club sits off Alico Road east of Ben Hill Griffin Parkway, which puts the gate roughly midway along a corridor that has spent the last year filling in faster than it's widening.
The Corner Filling In
Here's what's actually confirmed for the stretch of Alico Road residents drive every day:
- Fernandez the Bull Cafe signed on in 2025 for its fourth Florida location in a new plaza on Alico Road, developed by Colfax Development, a Coral Gables firm making its first Southwest Florida investment. The Alico location was planned at roughly 120 seats, the same footprint as the chain's Bonita Springs restaurant on Bonita Beach Road.
- The same Colfax plaza has already signed a barber shop, a kava bar, a smoke shop, and a book-and-coffee shop as tenants, according to Colfax managing partner Carmen de Jongh.
- A separate Colfax project on Three Oaks Parkway near Estero Parkway will bring a Foxtail Coffee location to the corridor.
- A Shake Shack has been targeted for Alico Road near I-75, which would make it the chain's first Lee County location, following existing SWFL sites in Naples.
- Alico Lakes Village, a 31-acre mixed-use development at the northeast corner of I-75 and Alico Road, already counts Ashley Furniture and City Furniture among its tenants, alongside a hotel and conference center, with zoning approved for up to 310,000 square feet of retail.
- Minneapolis-based Ryan Companies purchased a 61.3-acre tract that straddles Alico Road near U.S. 41 for $20.45 million in a deal that closed in March 2026. The parcel is zoned for up to 350 apartment units, 200,000 square feet of commercial space, and a hotel of up to 150 rooms, with the 14 acres south of Alico Road earmarked for a future quick-service restaurant, small shopping center, or convenience store.
None of that is speculative land banking. Each of these is a signed lease, a closed sale, or an approved zoning designation, which is a different category of certainty than the "coming soon" signage that's dotted this corridor for a decade.
What the Fernandez Family Already Knows About This Stretch
Frank Fernandez, who signed on to manage the Alico Road location as part of his family's restaurant group, described the site's split personality in an interview with Gulfshore Business:
"As a business owner, the commercial is great for lunch crowds and the residential is great for the dinner crowd."
That's a useful way to think about where Esplanade Lake Club fits into this. The north side of Alico Road near the restaurant's site is commercial. The south side, where Esplanade Lake Club and its neighbors sit, is residential. Fernandez isn't building for daytime office traffic. He's building for the dinner reservation that comes from the gated community less than a mile down the road, at a site where roughly 59,000 cars already pass daily on Alico Road west of I-75.
That daily count matters because it's the number the new construction is layered on top of, not a projection of what the corridor might handle once everything opens.
The Road Underneath All of It
The infrastructure meant to absorb some of that growth is the Three Oaks Parkway Extension, a Lee County Department of Transportation project connecting Three Oaks Parkway from Alico Road north to Daniels Parkway. It's a Tier 1 priority for the Lee County Board of County Commissioners, which means it's treated as essential rather than optional as the county's population grows. As of a July 2026 traffic advisory from Lee County DOT, the project is running ahead of its original timeline, with completion still projected for spring 2028.
The extension also includes widening Daniels Parkway to eight lanes between Danport Boulevard and Powers Court, work that's separate from the Alico Road corridor itself but tied to the same goal of giving drivers an alternate route around it.
Ahead of schedule is good news relative to where the project started. It doesn't change the fact that spring 2028 is still roughly eighteen months out. Every business on the list above is opening, or targeted to open, well before that date. Fernandez the Bull's plaza was in the works starting in early 2025. Shake Shack's Alico Road site was described in a March 2026 regional development roundup as roughly a year from opening, which would put it in the first half of 2027. Ryan Companies closed on its 61-acre parcel in March 2026, with the commercial component already pre-marketed to prospective tenants for years before that. The apartment and retail buildout on that site will proceed on its own schedule, separate from when the parallel road finishes.
Reading the Corridor if You Live Behind the Gate
The practical read for an Esplanade Lake Club resident is straightforward. The dining and retail options on Alico Road are about to expand meaningfully, and several of them (Fernandez the Bull in particular, given its owner's own framing of the residential dinner crowd) are being built with this specific stretch of homes in mind. That's a genuine upgrade to the day-to-day radius of the community, one that doesn't require the drive to Coconut Point or Gulf Coast Town Center for a sit-down meal.
At the same time, the road carrying all of that new traffic is the same two-lane-feeling stretch it's been for years, with its relief valve still under construction. The Alico Lakes Village buildout, the Ryan Companies parcel, and the Colfax plazas are all adding car trips to a corridor whose long-term fix won't be finished until 2028. Lee County's own DOT notice for the project change in August 2026 is a reasonable one to bookmark if you want to track progress without waiting for word of mouth.
None of this is a reason for concern. It's simply the shape of growth in this part of Estero right now: the businesses are arriving on a faster clock than the roads. Residents who know that going in can plan around it, whether that means picking off-peak hours for the new spots or just building in a few extra minutes for the Ben Hill Griffin Parkway light through 2027 and into 2028.
If you're weighing what a home at Esplanade Lake Club is worth against a corridor that's changing this quickly, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground context I bring to every conversation. Peggy Lotz has spent decades tracking how Southwest Florida's growth corridors actually play out, not just how they're marketed. Let's Talk — Schedule Your Personalized Consultation.
