Experience in Golf Clubhouse Design

Episode: The Case for Letting Members Smoke Inside Again — What Clubs Have Optimized Away in the Name of Modernization Over the past thirty years, private clubs across the country have systematically removed the sensory, social, and architectural textures that once defined club life — not because the law required it, but because boards, committees, and design consultants chose to. The cigar lounge...

The Pro Shop P&L Nobody Shows You — Why Club Retail Is One of the Worst-Performing Retail Businesses in America The average private club pro shop generates between $350,000 and $1.5 million in annual gross retail revenue — real money, by any measure — yet most boards have never seen a P&L that honestly accounts for staff time, facilities overhead, credit card fees, comp merchandise, and aged inven...

The Pro Shop Window Nobody Reads — Fifty Square Feet That Tells the Whole Story A regular member passes the pro shop window three to four hundred times over the course of a season, and a prospective member on a membership tour forms one of their first three impressions of the club standing in front of it. Despite that volume of exposure, the overwhelming majority of private club shop windows displ...

A Response to Howard Kuo's Essay on International Club Design Howard Kuo's Spring/Summer 2026 Forum essay argues that domestic private clubs have lessons to learn from international club models — and on several counts, he's correct. But the essay treats design as if design were the primary lever, when in reality it is a mid-level lever in a much larger system that includes business model, operatio...

Why Imitating the Famous Clubs Produces Awkward Copies Instead of Confident Institutions The overwhelming majority of American clubs are quietly modeling themselves after a handful of institutions they are not, cannot be, and should not try to be — Augusta, Pine Valley, Cypress Point, Seminole, Winged Foot, and a few others whose influence over boardrooms and design committees far exceeds any logi...

Why the Residential Real Estate Market Around Your Club Is Telling You More Than Your Board Realizes There is a person within fifteen minutes of your gate who knows more about your club's actual market position than your board president does — and your club has almost certainly never had a substantive conversation with them. Median initiation fees at established private clubs rose seventy-two perc...

The hardest stretch of any clubhouse renovation isn't the design phase, the demolition, or even the month-eight budget crisis. It's the final six months — the period between drywall and ribbon cutting — and most clubs enter it structurally unprepared. By the time a project is four months from opening, club leadership has typically lost quiet confidence in the contractor's ability to deliver, yet n...

Why Member Surveys Fail and What Strategic Listening Actually Requires Most private clubs run member surveys. Almost none of them run them well. The questions are drafted by the wrong people, fielded at the wrong intervals, analyzed without segmentation, and followed by silence — a sequence that teaches members, survey by survey, that their input is theater rather than intelligence. This episode m...

Why Open Kitchens Are Now Expected — and Why Most Clubs Get Them Wrong By the mid-2010s, the visible kitchen had stopped being a differentiator in contemporary dining and become a baseline expectation — yet most private clubs are still cutting holes in walls and calling it an open kitchen. The open kitchen is not a decorating choice. It is a fundamental rethinking of how the kitchen is laid out, h...

The wine rep who's been servicing clubs in your region for eighteen years knows which boards are about to fire their GM, which clubs are substituting cheaper products under the same menu prices, and which operations are quietly stretching payables to ninety days — and none of that intelligence is in any monthly report your board will ever read. Vendors are the private club industry's most accurate...

Most private club boards assume they compete within a metropolitan area, a regional reputation, or a demographic archetype. The actual competitive boundary is a drive-time radius of roughly twelve to eighteen minutes from your front gate — and inside that boundary, the total pool of households that can afford sustained full-service club membership, haven't already committed elsewhere, and are in a...

Why Most Club Plans Are Aspirations in a Binder Most private clubs spend between seventy-five and two hundred thousand dollars on a strategic plan that nobody uses to make real decisions. The leather-bound, consultant-facilitated, member-survey-informed document sitting on the GM's credenza is not a strategic plan — it's an opinion in a binder. This episode makes the case that a strategic plan inc...

The Architectural Reality Underneath the Trends Built around Chris Lewis's article "Changing golf clubhouses to meet member expectations," which ran in the July/August 2026 issue of Golf Inc. and featured insights from Susan Castor of Castor Design Associates and Brian Doerr of Strategic Club Solutions. The article catalogs the trends reshaping the private club industry — expanded dining venues, f...

Why Every Strategic Plan Has a Calibration Window, and What Happens When You Miss It Median initiation fees rose seventy-two percent between 2019 and 2022 in many markets, yet clubs across the country are still using pre-pandemic strategic plans to justify eight-figure capital projects. A strategic plan is not a document — it is an instrument with a calibration window, and outside that window it d...

Why the Four-to-Seven-Goal Framework Determines Whether Your Next GM Succeeds or Fails The average private club GM tenure is three to four years — and in most cases, the departure has nothing to do with the candidate. Boards conduct six-month searches, sign contracts, hold receptions, and send press releases, then spend the next eighteen months having quiet parking-lot conversations about whether...

Walk into the boardroom of almost any private club in America and you'll find two framed documents that nobody at the club can quote — not the board president, not the GM, not the membership chair. Private clubs collectively spend forty to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars on strategic planning retreats that produce mission and vision statements written by committee to offend no one, commit to...

On an eighteen-to-thirty-month renovation, members are paying full dues, often plus a capital assessment, while losing access to spaces they use daily — and most clubs respond to that sustained pressure with a paragraph at the bottom of the monthly newsletter that says construction is progressing well. The construction communication vacuum is not a side effect of renovation; it is the most expensi...

Clubs routinely commit twenty-five million dollars or more to renovation campaigns built on assumptions no one has tested, agreed on, or written down. The strategic plan and the master plan are not interchangeable documents — they are sequential, and the order is non-negotiable. Every dysfunction that surfaces in a building committee meeting, every capital campaign that stalls, every post-occupanc...

A meaningful number of golf clubhouses across the American West, the Carolinas, and increasingly places nobody used to worry about are now functionally uninsurable at the coverage levels their boards assume they have — the policies still get renewed, the signatures still get made, but the deductibles have moved, the exclusions have grown, and the replacement-cost language has been quietly softened...

The Award Submission Tells On You — What the Clubhouse of the Year Entry Actually Reveals About Your Project Golf Inc.'s Clubhouse of the Year competition has been running for thirty years, and the cumulative archive of winners represents one of the only longitudinal records of how clubhouse design has evolved in America. The deadline for the 30th annual competition is July 6th, 2026, covering any...

Walk through enough old clubhouses and you'll find it within the first ten minutes: the wing the GM gestures at vaguely before moving on, the room with a brass plaque announcing a function that hasn't existed in fifteen years, the space that has quietly become the most honest thing in the building. Empty wings are not architectural failures — they are diagnostic instruments, and what they reveal a...

The Cart Barn Nobody Sees — The Most Operationally Critical Building on the Property A typical private club operates 60–120 golf carts representing $500K to over $1M in asset value, plus support equipment that rivals a small commercial trucking operation. And in most clubs, all of it is housed in a building designed like a glorified storage shed. This episode makes the case that the cart barn, mor...

The Best Clubs Have the Worst Coffee — What Clubs Prioritize, What They Ignore, and What It Reveals Some of the most beautiful clubhouses in America serve drip coffee from a banquet urn. The dining room is exquisite. The art is curated. The wine cellar is illuminated from below. And the most-consumed beverage in the entire building, touched by members every single morning, is an afterthought. This...

Why Punch Lists Destroy Clubhouse Projects and How to Manage the Closeout Phase On a thirty-million-dollar clubhouse renovation, the punch list alone can run three hundred to five hundred items — and that's not a sign of bad construction, it's the nature of finishing a technically dense building at this level of quality. Yet the closeout phase is the one phase nobody budgets, nobody resources, and...

Most private clubs in America can deliver one of three essential drink experiences their membership needs. A handful deliver two. Almost none deliver all three — and the gap between one and three is the difference between a venue members visit for occasions and a building that becomes part of their actual daily life. This episode introduces the three-drink test: can a member have a casual coffee s...