Author: golfclubhousedesign

The Construction Communication Vacuum

Episode: The Construction Communication Vacuum — Why Silence During Renovation Costs More Than the Renovation 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 […]

The Two Plans Every Club Needs

Episode: The Two Plans Every Club Needs — Why the Strategic Plan Has to Come Before the Master Plan 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 […]

What the Plateau Burned Down

Wildfire, Insurance, and the Clubhouses Nobody Wants to Rebuild 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 […]

The Empty Wing

Episode: The Empty Wing — What Abandoned Spaces Reveal About a Club’s Past and Future 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 […]

The Last Ten Percent Eats the Project

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 […]

Three Drinks, Three Rooms, One Building

The Simplest Test for Whether Your Clubhouse Actually Works 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 […]

The Award Submission Tells On You

Episode: 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 […]

The Best Clubs have the Worst Coffee

Episode 135 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 […]