Clubhouse
What often is missed about the Golden Age of golf course design is that the innovations at play weren’t limited to the courses. America’s clubhouses, too, were advancing—and just look how far they’ve come
Parallel births of the modern, on course and off
Donald Ross, Alister MacKenzie and A.W. Tillinghast are familiar enough to golf aficionados, having designed some of America’s (and the world’s) seminal course layouts. But as those gentlemen were pushing the game forward on course, parallel advances were happening in golf ’s clubhouses. Led by the dean of early 20th-century clubhouse design, Clifford C. Wendehack (of Winged Foot fame), architects began designing more significant and complex commercial buildings during the 1920s, creating lasting architectural legacies that complemented and defined the courses around them. In California and Florida the designs were highlighted by stunning Spanish and Italian styling, while early 20th century architect Roger Bullard noted that New England’s clubs were being “influenced by American Colonial, English Georgian and French farmhouse design,” according to the March, 1925, piece he wrote in The Architectural Forum.
In the subsequent 75 years of American golf club development, architects and private club owners seemingly kept subscribing to the same blueprints/design principles from previous generations—producing “traditional-looking” clubhouses for the most part, albeit much grander in scale in many modern-era cases. When Tyson Foods chairman John H. Tyson developed his private golf club 20 years ago near the meat-producing empire started by his innovative grandfather in Springdale, Ark., the third-generation Tyson Foods leader proved to be innovative in his own right.
At least that is one way to describe Blessings Golf Club and the distinctive clubhouse Tyson unveiled in 2004 near Fayetteville. Indeed, after Tyson hired famed architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. to design his championship 18-hole layout that serves as the home course to the University of Arkansas golf teams, the billionaire decided to take a contrarian clubhouse design approach (to say the least) when he hired local architect Marlon Blackwell, who admittedly knew nothing about golf at the time.
“I remember telling John I’m not sure if I’m the right person, and he said, ‘why not?’” recalls Blackwell, who went on to design numerous critically acclaimed projects and now serves as a Distinguished Professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design at his hometown University of Arkansas. “John told me a clubhouse isn’t just about golf. It’s about people and space.’ And I said, ‘well, I can do that,’ and I ended up getting educated by my client pretty quickly and that gave me some confidence.”
According to Tyson, who grew up playing golf on a modest 9-hole course in Springdale, he was tired of seeing the same traditional structures being presented by several top architects he interviewed prior to picking Blackwell, who had just finished a renovation of Tyson’s home. The challenge for Tyson’s next real estate project: create something more representative of his roots and character and befitting of the golf club’s pristine northwest Arkansas property situated along Clear Creek.
Ultimately, what The Blessings’ cutting-edge clubhouse design and land plan wound up being was not only “non-traditional” but something well ahead of its time. There was the intentional approach toward simplicity and function; a genuine sense of authenticity by integrating Arkansas’ “cash crops” like hardwood walnut, cherry and copper; an overall mindset that considered inclusivity and the gathering of people; and last but not least, thoughtful calculations about creating a seamless “indoor-outdoor” experience that has become ubiquitous in hundreds of major clubhouse projects from coast to coast in recent years. In many respects, when Tyson and his membership officially blessed the completed project in 2004, it epitomized what would become the gold standard of the new 21st-century golf clubhouse.
Architect Erik Peterson, founding principal of Scottsdale- and Beverly Hills-based PHX Architects, is one leading clubhouse designer today who shares a similar philosophy and embraces contemporary architectural standards. He says traditional clubhouse models omnipresent throughout the last century are no longer relevant for 21st-century membership models that increasingly must equally appeal to males and females, multi-generational families and members along a wide spectrum of tastes and styles.
“Basically, the modern clubhouses of today have to be something that’s very different from before,” says Peterson, who’s in the process of designing another new clubhouse for PGA Tour star Phil Mickelson in Calgary at a brand new course under construction called Mickelson National Golf Club. “It has to be efficient and it has to be designed in a way that is sustainable… We can’t keep creating these monster big buildings that cost so much money because it’s about someone’s piece of artwork or not allowing costs to interfere with the integrity of the design.
“The philosophy that distinguishes our firm is we merge all of these pieces together. It has to be financially viable, environmentally sustainable, and yes, it needs to be beautiful and appealing for all members.”
The mistake of course, at least by a number of private golf club owners or boards in previous decades of clubhouse
Large buildings with rambling rooms have given way to communitydriven structures
development, was letting ego drive many trophy clubhouse projects, a number of which became far less efficient and functional over time.
“In the past we used to do these 100,000-square-foot clubhouses with rambling rooms,” Peterson adds, “And the problem with these is clubs have to have staff members operate that… It becomes almost an absolute money-sucking monster that is completely unsustainable for a membership ever to support. They lose money year after year after year, which is just completely unacceptable.
“And the club industry has almost mentally in their head accepted that a club is going to lose money year after year, which is just absurd in this economy. Financially [the old clubhouse model] won’t work and then what do we have left? A beautiful building that sits empty or a club that’s failed. That makes no sense to me.”
Tyson shared that same perspective, scaling the Blessings clubhouse to be some 20,000 square-feet at a cost of just over $5 million, which he says was below industry cost standards at the time.
Rather, Tyson wanted a place that not only represented his personality, but that also reflected what he thought was the personality of the land as well as the “overall relationship of the buildings to the land and into the game of golf.”
Knowing Arkansas’ college golf teams would be a component of club life, Tyson says the final inspiration for the complex was simply about “creating an experience that was relevant to what I thought our membership might be inclined toward. We have the university golfers who are welcome to come out whenever they want. We have the older male and female members and the younger children, and everybody is always running into everybody. We don’t have these compartmentalized pieces so to speak.’’
That element of creating a welcoming atmosphere to serve a community of all types of modern-day members— and encouraging them to gather—is perhaps the biggest shift informing some of the more compelling clubhouses being built or rebuilt today by leading design firms such as New York- and San Francisco-based Hart Howerton or Kuo Diedrich Chi Architects of Atlanta.
Many involved in today’s thriving private golf club management will tell you the intangible essence of a club, its “soul of place,” derives from a sense of community, of belonging. And one of the common practices used to achieve this culture is through placemaking—the art of creating a “heart and soul to a project, rather than just creating beautiful-looking buildings to house members and guests,” says Hart Howerton principal Roland Aberg.
The McLemore, a new luxurious private golf resort community laid across a picturesque plateau atop Lookout Mountain in Rising Fawn, GA, might be the quintessential model for the modern clubhouse as it relates to design, construction and overall land and landscape planning. Featuring a completely rebuilt 18-hole course and 6-hole layout by Rees Jones and Bill Bergin that opened in late 2019, McLemore members now enjoy a remarkable newly opened $8-million clubhouse that seems to be tucked in and around the cliffside edges of the mountain with panoramic vistas from a stunning vantage point of some 2,300 feet above sea level.
Aberg, who was the project’s master planner, collaborated on the compelling indoor-outdoor complex with fellow Hart Howerton principal Tim Slattery, who was in charge of architectural design. Simply put, the McLemore’s new “home away from home,” which will eventually feature a boutique resort lodge component, is a sensational piece of “placemaking” of a type one would expect to see at the world’s most renowned resort destinations.
For developer and club owner William “Duane” Horton, who can almost see his childhood-home from the property’s perch, the clubhouse was paramount in the overall development’s plan as much as the surrounding championship course and 300-plus homes that will range in price from the low $600,000s to more than $2 million. In fact, Horton valued the potential of Hart Howerton’s plans so much he actually defied what most developers would do and repositioned the clubhouse on some of the most stunning parts of the mountain formerly routed for the golf course and real estate.
Horton and the Hart Howerton team also kept the clubhouse buildings to just an intimate and modest 10,000some square feet in scope.
“We really spent a large part of our investment on the outdoor areas and making those accessible,” says Horton, president of Scenic Land Company that took control of the property in 2017. “Doing things like our dining terraces and beer garden and event lawn. When it’s winter and cold, you don’t normally have as many people there anyways, so you don’t need as much space under cover.
“But when it’s really nice, people today want to be outdoors. So we handled our maximum capacity by really focusing on the outdoors and these extensions. Our clubhouse has so many places you can come in and out of, that it really is an extension of the outdoor spaces.”
“Our clubhouse has so many places you can come in and out of, that it really is an extension of the outdoor spaces”
Architect Mark Diedrich, whose award-winning namesake firm just completed a new clubhouse project for the Arnold Palmer-designed Balsam Mountain golf club in Sylva, N.C., and who recently received a commendation for work at The Landings in Savannah, GA (which features two Arnold Palmer-designed courses) says most if not all of KDC’s clients today are incorporating similar leisure lifestyle “clubhouse villages” where the center of member activity and life seamlessly blends between various indooroutdoor elements and recreational amenities.
The Landings is a perfect example of this, a top-quality community with five golf courses and a host of resort-style amenities that attracts a wide range of residents across the age and professional spectrum. KDC’s new Marshwood Clubhouse at The Landings recently was awarded third place in Golf Inc’s “Clubhouse of the Year” competition, and makes innovative use of cross-branding, highlighting the relationship between legendary golfer Arnold Palmer and the incredible Landings community in a modern clubhouse that seamlessly integrates traditional comforts with forward-looking technologies and amenities.
Similarly, Diedrich explains that Balsam Mountain’s conservation-oriented mountaintop is about throwing the “old clubhouse design model out the window.” Laid out across 4,400 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, the property was an opportunity for Diedrich and his partners to move another step forward in their “de-clubbing” of the look, feel and style of the traditional golf club—right in line with Diedrich’s standing as a member of the Urban Land Institute’s Recreational Development Council and former speaker at Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s continuing education program.
Case in point is Balsam’s Double Top Village that opened last October on the site of old garnet mine, with 20-plus cottages and multiple buildings comprising numerous recreational amenities—all organized around outdoor spaces with striking views of the surrounding Double Top mountains and the club’s innovative and newly designed Palmer Practice Park.
According to Diedrich, Balsam Mountain wanted something that was “not a club,” while serving as the amenity center for the community. “We took the traditional clubhouse and blew it up. Today, we have to think about more than just the inside of the building if the club’s going to be successful in the future.”
Back at the Blessings, when asked about his favorite part of the property, Tyson says it’s being inside the big room of the clubhouse in front of towering panoramic glass windows where he can take in the ever evolving landscape and watch the timeless tradition of smiling golfers doffing caps and shaking hands after putting out at their rounds’ end.
After all, that’s really what private club life is all about: the shared experience of the golfing lifestyle. Ideas of community and purpose transcend the material world, and just as they drove the likes of Ross, MacKenzie and Tillinghast, so do they continue to drive the innovators of today—on course and off.
The Landings is a superlative example of modern,
purpose-driven design