Disney's Beach Club Resort
Disney's Beach Club Resort is a deluxe resort hotel at Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida. Opened on November 19, 1990, it occupies the northern shore of Crescent Lake in the EPCOT Resort Area, immediately beside Disney's Yacht Club Resort and within walking distance of EPCOT. Where the Yacht Club is formal and nautical, the Beach Club is its lighter counterpart, modelled on the summer beach cottages of the New England coast.
Design and theme
The Beach Club was designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects as a companion to the Yacht Club, which had opened a fortnight earlier. Stern based the pair on the seaside resorts built along the New England and mid-Atlantic coasts around the turn of the twentieth century, with the Beach Club drawing in particular on the Victorian-influenced cottages of Cape May, New Jersey. Its exterior is painted in pale blue with white trim, and its interiors use wicker furniture, shell and beach motifs and a brighter palette than the wood-panelled Yacht Club next door.
The two hotels function in many respects as one resort. They share restaurants, a convention centre and their main pool complex, and guests move freely between them along internal and lakeside paths.
Rooms and the Villas
The hotel has about 580 guest rooms, including club-level rooms in the Stone Harbor Club. Most rooms have full or standing-room balconies, and categories range from standard views of the grounds to water views over Crescent Lake.
Disney's Beach Club Villas, a Disney Vacation Club development, opened on July 1, 2002, in a separate building behind the main hotel. The villas provide studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom units with kitchens or kitchenettes, and share the resort's facilities while operating as timeshare accommodation rather than ordinary hotel rooms.
Dining
The Beach Club's best-known restaurant is Beaches & Cream Soda Shop, a small ice-cream parlour styled as an old-fashioned soda fountain, notable for the Kitchen Sink, a large sundae served in a sink-shaped bowl and intended for sharing. Cape May Cafe, named for the New Jersey resort that inspired the hotel's architecture, offers a character breakfast and a seafood-focused dinner buffet. The Martha's Vineyard lounge and the Hurricane Hanna's poolside bar serve the resort's casual trade, and the full range of Yacht Club restaurants, including the Yachtsman Steakhouse, is next door.
Stormalong Bay
With the Yacht Club, the Beach Club shares Stormalong Bay, a three-acre swimming complex of about 750,000 gallons restricted to guests of the two hotels. It combines a sand-bottomed pool, a lazy river, whirlpools, smaller pools linked by bridges and waterfalls, and a waterslide running from the wreck of a ship on the lakeside. The complex is the principal reason many guests choose the two hotels, and it is frequently described as the most extensive pool at Walt Disney World. The Beach Club also maintains a quiet pool, the Dunes Cove pool near the villas, and fronts a white-sand beach on Crescent Lake.
Transportation
EPCOT's International Gateway entrance is a walk of roughly five minutes, the shortest walk between any Walt Disney World hotel and a theme park entrance. Disney's Hollywood Studios can be reached on foot or by Friendship Boat, which also call at Disney's BoardWalk Inn and the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin. Bus services run to the Magic Kingdom, Disney's Animal Kingdom, the water parks and Disney Springs.