Experience in Golf Clubhouse Design

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...