Braderie South on Jekyll Island: A Local's Guide to Event Access

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, Braderie South's opening event.

Braderie South ran Friday through Sunday, 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. For year-round residents, the practical details were which rooms and lawns hosted ticketed events at specific hours, and which parts of a usual weekend routine remained unchanged.

It isn't one event. It's a stack of them.

"Braderie South" includes several events across the resort's 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.

The announced schedule was:

• 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, was the featured guest alongside his co-founder Chelcie Eastman; the event's second-year schedule also included additional programming. The event closed Sunday afternoon with a keynote conversation, described on the event's own site as the Sunday Salon, built around that same guest appearance.

For residents, the schedule reserved the Croquet Lawn for ticket holders from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, with white attire encouraged. The Grand Dining Room was scheduled for a murder mystery dinner Saturday night and a ticketed tea Sunday at 12:30.

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.

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.

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.

What stayed open

The Club's regular restaurants were not part of the ticketed footprint. The Wharf, the over-water restaurant on the pier, was scheduled to keep its normal weekend hours and its usual weekend live music. The Pantry was scheduled to keep serving its regular breakfast and lunch crowd. Neither of those venues shows up anywhere on the Braderie schedule, so the ticketed programming was scheduled for the Croquet Lawn, the Grand Dining Room and 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. 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 during the event it was scheduled to do double duty as both a historic curiosity and a ticketed cocktail lounge.

The parking wrinkle that has nothing to do with Braderie

Drivers going up Riverview Drive during the event would have paid 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 carried that designation wasn't listed publicly; drivers would have needed to check at the entry gate for any additional charge.

Parking at the Club itself was free once visitors passed through the gate, and the resort's shuttle between the Club and the Jekyll Ocean Club was scheduled to continue its normal half-hour loop for overnight guests. Neither service was listed as changing for Braderie. The Club's lot could have been busier during the scheduled ticketed-program windows: Friday evening, Saturday evening, and Sunday midday.

Marketplace access and daytime options

The marketplace itself, separate from the evening add-ons, was open to the public with a day or weekend pass, and the resort's own materials noted that anyone over the age of 12 needed a ticket to walk the exhibitor floor. Overnight guests had that access built into their stay. For residents who wanted to see what a room full of antique dealers and Southern collectors looked 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., were the lowest-friction way in.

By Sunday evening, the ticketed events were scheduled to have ended, after which the Croquet Lawn and Grand Dining Room could return to their usual uses.

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.