If you drive Highway 28 through Crystal Bay this month, you'll pass a construction fence around a building that opened in 1926. This is its centennial year. The party it was supposed to throw for itself never happened, because the building is still gutted, still scaffolded, and still at least a year from welcoming anyone back through its doors.
That's not a complaint. It's the most useful thing a current Crystal Bay resident can know heading into fall: the two landmarks everyone associates with this stretch of shoreline, the Cal Neva and the old Tahoe Biltmore, are both mid-transformation and neither is close to finished. Meanwhile, the actual life of the neighborhood this summer happened somewhere else entirely, in the handful of small businesses that kept their lights on through a decade of boarded windows next door.
The birthday present that's running late
The Cal Neva has been owned by McWhinney, a Colorado development firm, since April 2023, when the company bought the 13-acre property from Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Ellison had picked it up at a bankruptcy auction in 2018 for $35.8 million. McWhinney paid nearly $52 million five years later, and this April closed a $298 million financing package to actually build the thing, now under the name Lake Tahoe Proper Resort & Casino. The capital stack includes $223 million in C-PACE financing, the largest such loan in Nevada history and the first ever recorded in Washoe County, plus a $75 million construction loan from Banc of California.
The plan keeps the bones locals remember: the Circle Bar, the 225-seat theater built so a singer could work a room without a microphone, the fireplace that marks the state line running straight through the property. Interior design is being led by Kelly Wearstler, whose approach, as she described it to ABC10 in recent coverage of the project, is about building on what already exists rather than replacing it. When finished, the resort will hold 197 rooms, suites, and private villas across the same footprint.
Here's the part that matters if you've been watching the fencing for two years and wondering when it ends: McWhinney originally wanted to reopen by December 2026, timed to the resort's 100th anniversary and to Frank Sinatra's birthday. As reported by the Tahoe Daily Tribune last August, the team walked that back. The new target is sometime in 2027, with no month set. A hundred-year-old building in the Tahoe Basin, built mostly of wood, sitting on a site that burned once already in 1937, does not renovate on anyone's marketing calendar. That's the honest version, and it's a better one to plan your year around than the version that still says 2026.
Next door, the clock has barely moved
If the Cal Neva timeline slipped by about a year, the property next door tells a slower story. The former Tahoe Biltmore closed for good on April 30, 2022, after EKN Development Group bought it in 2021 for $56.8 million with plans to build a Waldorf Astoria. Hilton signed the brand agreement that year, and early announcements pointed to a 2027 debut for what would be Waldorf Astoria's first property in the Sierra Nevada, with 76 guest rooms and 61 branded residences. In 2023, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency approved a revised, smaller plan, cutting total units from 334 to 177.
Then the financing got complicated. EKN defaulted on an $82 million loan in 2024, pulled back from the brink after the notice of default was rescinded that October, and then lost the property anyway. In July 2025, the site sold in a foreclosure sale to Lake Tahoe Partners LLC, the same entity tied to the original developer who bought the land back in 2007, according to Tahoe Daily Tribune reporting on the sale. The report noted the change in ownership doesn't affect the site's existing permits, but as of this April, the main casino structure was still standing and still extremely dilapidated, more than three years after the Biltmore closed its doors.
Put the two projects side by side and the contrast is the story:
- Cal Neva: financing closed, construction underway, opening pushed from 2026 to sometime in 2027
- Tahoe Biltmore site: brand deal announced in 2022, project foreclosed and resold in 2025, original 1948 structure still standing and unsecured as of this spring
One project is a year behind. The other has spent most of the last three years standing still, changing hands, and waiting for its next chapter to actually start.
The block that never went dark
None of this has stopped Crystal Bay from having a real summer, because the neighborhood's day-to-day life was never really tied to either landmark. Of the three original anchor businesses that once defined this stretch, Crystal Bay Club is the one still standing and still hosting a full calendar, home to the Crown Room and the intimate Red Room, the venues that give the property its self-applied nickname as the epicenter of Lake Tahoe entertainment.
A few steps from the construction fencing, Charlie Soule has run the Soule Domain at Crystal Bay's western entrance for 40 years, serving the kind of elevated, unfussy menu regulars order from memory. Smoke Door, a Japanese restaurant with prix fixe menus running from $88 to $198, opened in July 2023, right in the stretch when the boarded-up buildings around it were at their worst, and has held its footing since. Crystal Bay Steak & Lobster House keeps the filet mignon and the intimate dining room going a few doors down, and Jim Kelley's Tahoe Nugget, a smaller, long-running casino, still pulls its loyal regulars through the door. None of these businesses waited for a resort reopening to decide the neighborhood was worth staying in.
This summer's proof
Two dated events this year backed that up. From May 16 through 25, the Incline Village Crystal Bay Business Association ran its third annual Restaurant Week, a ten day stretch where local kitchens built special menus and a portion of every sale went to the Boys and Girls Club of North Lake Tahoe. It's the kind of event that only works if the restaurants putting it on plan to still be here next year.
Then, on the weekend of July 23 through 25, Crystal Bay Club hosted the Gambler's Run Music Festival, with a lineup anchored by The String Cheese Incident and Big Head Todd & The Monsters, alongside Diggin Dirt, Octave Cat, Sicard Hollow, Robert Jon & The Wreck, and Chalk Dinosaur, according to the Sierra Sun's summer concert roundup. For one weekend, the same lot that sits half a mile from two fenced construction sites had the kind of crowd that used to fill this whole corridor decades ago.
The neighborhood you're actually living in right now
If you've been reading the headlines about Crystal Bay's comeback for the past few years, you'd be forgiven for expecting a different town than the one that's actually here. The resorts are real, the money behind them is real, and the design work being done on the Cal Neva in particular respects what this place used to be. But neither building will define your daily life here for at least another year, and the Biltmore site may take considerably longer than that.
What's already true, this month, is that a restaurant that opened in 1985 is still serving dinner two hundred feet from a construction fence, that a music festival drew a real crowd to a casino that never closed, and that a community restaurant week just raised money for local kids for the third year running. That's the Crystal Bay that exists right now, and it's worth knowing the difference between that and the renderings.
Harmony Steingrebe has been tracking every phase of both projects as part of staying current on the North Shore market, from permitting to financing to the small business turnover that tells you more about a neighborhood's health than any press release does. If you're weighing what any of this means for a property you already own on this stretch of shoreline, or you're simply curious how the Cal Neva and Waldorf Astoria timelines might shape the next few years here, Harmony Steingrebe is glad to walk through it with you. Schedule a private consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
