If you drove past the Jekyll Island Club Resort on Riverview Drive Friday evening, you probably saw something odd against the oak canopy: a lawn full of people in white, holding champagne, taking practice swings with croquet mallets. That was Caviar, Croquet & Champagne, the opening event of Braderie South, and if you didn't already have it on your calendar, the scene made no sense at all.
Braderie South is running Friday through Sunday this weekend, August 28 to 30, 2026, and it's the second time the Jekyll Island Club Resort has turned its historic core into an antiques and fine art marketplace. The event itself gets plenty of press coverage. What doesn't get covered anywhere is the part that actually matters if you live here year-round: which rooms and lawns stop being public space for a few specific hours, and which parts of your normal weekend routine are untouched.
It isn't one event. It's a stack of them.
The confusion starts because "Braderie South" gets used as shorthand for at least four different things happening in the same three buildings. There's the marketplace itself, more than twenty exhibitors this year selling antiques, art, jewelry, and heirlooms across the resort's rooms and grounds, open to anyone who buys a day or weekend pass. Then there's a layer of separately ticketed evening programming built on top of that same footprint, each one closing off a specific space to everyone except the people holding that ticket.
Here's what's actually scheduled, and where:
- Caviar, Croquet & Champagne — Friday, August 28, 5 to 7 p.m., on the Croquet Lawn. White attire encouraged, $50 per person.
- Braderie After Dark — Friday and Saturday nights, inside the Alexander Bar & Boar's Head Lounge.
- Braderie Boulevard — Saturday and Sunday starting at 10 a.m., a vintage car showcase for automobiles 50 years or older, staged on the resort's oak-lined lawn.
- The Antique Heist — Saturday, August 29, 5:30 p.m., a murder mystery dinner in the Grand Dining Room. Adults $75, children $45.
- High Tea with Gray Benko — Sunday, August 30, 12:30 p.m., also in the Grand Dining Room. Adults $68, children $40.
That last name is worth a beat. Gray Benko, of the Magnolia Network show "Happy to Be Home With the Benkos" and co-founder of Gray Benko Home, is this year's featured guest alongside his co-founder Chelcie Eastman, and his presence is the reason the resort expanded programming for year two. The event closes Sunday afternoon with a keynote conversation, described on the event's own site as the Sunday Salon, built around that same guest appearance.
So the practical read for a resident is this: the Croquet Lawn is a public lawn every other Friday of the year, but from 5 to 7 p.m. this Friday it belongs to fifty-dollar ticket holders in white. The Grand Dining Room, which normally seats whoever walks in for Sunday brunch, is doing a scheduled murder mystery dinner Saturday night and a ticketed tea Sunday at 12:30. If you show up expecting your usual table, you'll find a different kind of crowd.
What changed since last August
This is only the event's second run, and the difference between year one and year two tells you something about where it's headed.
| August 2025 (inaugural) | August 2026 (this weekend) | |
|---|---|---|
| Dates | Aug. 22-24 | Aug. 28-30 |
| Featured guest | None | Gray Benko, Magnolia Network |
| Signature evening events | Car display only | Croquet reception, murder mystery dinner, high tea, after-hours lounge event |
| Vintage car showcase | Roughly 40 cars | Organizers describe an expanded field for 2026 |
Last year's version was a single new idea: an antiques market with a car show attached, covered by local station WTOC as a one-off "recreate the aura" weekend. This year the resort built a full schedule of ticketed add-ons around it and brought in a national television personality to anchor the closing event. That's a meaningful jump in a single year, and it's the kind of growth that tends to mean more of the property gets carved out for private programming, not less, the next time it comes around.
The resort's managing director, Shane Pappas, put it plainly when the 2026 lineup was announced: the expanded programming and the addition of Gray Benko were meant to "deepen the connections between collectors, designers and our exceptional exhibitor community." That's a description written for the antiques trade, but it's also a signal to residents that next August will likely look bigger still.
What actually stays open
Here's the part that should ease anyone bracing for a lost weekend. The Club's regular restaurants aren't part of the ticketed footprint. The Wharf, the over-water restaurant on the pier, keeps its normal weekend hours and its usual weekend live music. The Pantry keeps serving its regular breakfast and lunch crowd. Neither of those venues shows up anywhere on the Braderie schedule, which means the disruption is really contained to two rooms (the Croquet Lawn and the Grand Dining Room) and one bar (the Alexander Bar & Boar's Head Lounge) during a handful of specific windows, not the whole property all weekend.
It's also worth knowing that the Alexander Bar has its own bit of Jekyll trivia attached, which is part of why Braderie After Dark is staged there. The rounded bar is a replica built as a movie set for "The Legend of Bagger Vance," filmed on Jekyll Island in 2000. It's been a fixture of the resort ever since, and this weekend it's simply doing double duty as both a historic curiosity and a ticketed cocktail lounge.
The parking wrinkle that has nothing to do with Braderie
If you're driving up Riverview Drive this weekend, you'll pay the island's standard entry toll, which the Jekyll Island Authority raised this year from $8 to $10 for a single day and from $75 to $100 for an annual pass. On top of that base fee, the Authority's posted policy adds another $5 on days it designates as special events, the same mechanism that pushes the toll up during Shrimp & Grits Festival weekend and again through the holiday season. Whether Braderie South weekend carries that designation isn't listed anywhere public, but the entry gate will tell you the moment you pull up, so it's worth having a few extra dollars ready regardless of which line you're standing in for.
Parking at the Club itself is free once you're through the gate, and the resort's shuttle between the Club and the Jekyll Ocean Club still runs its normal half-hour loop for overnight guests. None of that changes for Braderie. What changes is simply how full the Club's own lot gets during the hours the Croquet Lawn and Grand Dining Room are hosting ticketed programming, which lines up with the windows above: Friday evening, Saturday evening, and Sunday midday.
If you want to see it without buying in
The marketplace itself, separate from the evening add-ons, is open to the public with a day or weekend pass, and the resort's own materials note that anyone over the age of 12 needs a ticket to walk the exhibitor floor. Overnight guests get that access built into their stay. If you're a resident who just wants to see what a room full of antique dealers and Southern collectors looks like without committing to the $50 croquet reception or the $75 dinner theater, the daytime hours of the marketplace itself, and the free-to-view car showcase on the lawn Saturday and Sunday starting at 10 a.m., are the lowest-friction way in.
Either way, by Sunday evening the Croquet Lawn goes back to being just a lawn, the Grand Dining Room goes back to seating whoever walks in, and the only trace left of the weekend will be a few extra cars in the historic district and a new set of stories from whoever bought the tea ticket.
If you're weighing whether a home in the historic district or elsewhere on the island fits how you actually want to spend your weekends, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks these patterns year-round. Kimberly Pelletier would be glad to have it with you. Let's Connect.
