Rancho La Quinta latest desert golf club to join trend of renovated clubhouses
Twenty to 25 years ago, about the time the clubhouse was built at Rancho La Quinta Country Club, clubhouses for golf courses were a place to have a pro shop, locker rooms and perhaps a grill for lunch after a round or a social dinner for the club members.
As golf slowly started to lose players and rounds played for the first 15 or so years of the century, clubhouses became less about golf and more about an overall country club lifestyle. So the timing for Rancho La Quinta to join the trend of facilities updating their clubhouses seems about right.
“One of the biggest deals is that our club has not been renovated since it was initially opened in 2000,” said Monica Davis, the general manager for the last year at the 36-hole Rancho La Quinta. “And the cantina, many years prior to that. What we lack is kind of a more up-to-date, finished décor. We also lack a bar.”
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That should all change by the end of 2024. A 16-month renovation of the clubhouse as well as the racquet club at the facility should begin by September, with a December 2024 target date to unveil the finished product.
The host of the Skins Game from 1996 through 1998, the current clubhouse at Rancho La Quinta came a few years later with a Spanish theme both inside and out. That theme will remain the same and the outside of the building won’t change much, Davis said. Inside, the renovations are designed to change the way members use the clubhouse.
“We are really going to expand on the indoor-outdoor dining space,” Davis said. “It will be climate controlled with heaters, misters, fans and some trellising built out so we can take advantage of what we see south and west.”
The changes can be traced back to August 2021, when the homeowners’ association at Rancho La Quinta took over the club from the original developer, Drummond Corporation.
Community input
“We went out into the community and had surveys. What creates value if we were to make a project expansion?” said Rick Anderson, president of the board of directors at the club since February. “What would you like to see? And we went through a couple of iterations of that and started big and kind of right-sized it a little bit. So in a community this size, a majority of the members said we like it and some people said we want more and some people said we want less or not at all.”
In the end, 70 percent of the members who cast ballots approved the renovations. The club has 890 homes in the community, but a handful of outside memberships brings the total to 932.
The focal point of the changes in the clubhouse will be an existing sunken bar that will be renovated as part of the indoor-outdoor dining area. But there will be other changes, including the move of the existing pro shop into a building currently used as a grill, or cantina.
Changes will also come to the racquet club facility, with the tennis pro shop moving and being replaced by a dining and membership gathering area. A new gym will be added and the old gym will become a group fitness area, Davis said. Eight pickleball courts were added to the property two years ago.
None of the changes should be seen as taking the focus off of the two 18-hole golf courses, one by Robert Trent Jones Jr. and one by Jerry Pate.
“Golf is still kind of very, very critical to the community here,” Anderson said. “We have a very active golf community here. The golf committee has kind of put together a three-to-five-year strategic plan for the golf courses. So we have other plans that we will fund in other ways that will continue to make the golf courses the best they can be.”
The timetable for the renovations will mean the clubhouse will be under construction for all of the 2023-24 golf season, which usually starts at desert clubs with a welcome back party sometime in early November.
“We also have a tradition of a welcome back barbecue. So that barbecue may be more robust using our event lawn,” Davis said. “Our No. 1 goal from an operating standpoint is not to have a lesser member experience. It may not be what it once was, but we still want to engage and make sure that our members have a great experience next season while they have limited facilities.”
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Rancho La Quinta Country Club to renovate golf clubhouse
