Hamilton Farm Golf Club in Gladstone, N.J., has spent the last six years recruiting a management team of private club industry veterans who could execute a focused strategic plan: to provide the highest-quality and most personalized service, food, amenities and golf to their members.
Hamilton Farm’s staff believes it is their constant accommodation and vigilant attention to detail, member needs, teamwork and quality that puts this plan into action day in and day out.
“What I hear from members more often than not at Hamilton Farm is how when they drive through our front gates, they’re able to just let everything go,” remarked David Townsend, president of Hamilton Farm and Townsend Capital. “Everything’s checked at the door. Everything’s taken care of. Every need and preference is anticipated. They can come here and relax and forget about the outside world for awhile.”
And at the end of the day, isn’t that what being a club member is about?
The Hamilton Farm Vision
When Townsend Capital LLC, a family-owned real estate investment and development company based in Maryland, acquired Hamilton Farm in 2001, they had a clear vision about the membership experience they wanted to provide. “We wanted to distinguish ourselves from other clubs by providing our members and guests an experience and level of service unparalleled in the industry,” Townsend said.
After several staff changes within the first few years of operation, Townsend brought in Timothy Bakels, the club’s general manager and chief operating officer since August 2006, to help carry out that vision.
“Tim has given us the leadership we really need in that top position to implement and accelerate our plans for Hamilton Farm,” Townsend said. “He sees the little extra thing that can be done for a member that goes above and beyond the typical level of service, and he’s bringing the rest of the staff up to that level, too.”
Townsend also noted Bakels’ “entrepreneurial personality” and “deep understanding” of all facets of club operations. “You want the person managing your club to see the big picture and not just be a specialist in one given area,” he said.
Bakels, who has more than 30 years experience in the hospitality business, said he was inspired by the Townsend family’s dedication to creating a world-class golfing experience and thrilled by the challenge of building a team that would constantly strive to surpass any member’s expectations.
“We—and I mean ‘we’ as a management team and as a Hamilton Farm family—are constantly asking how we can perform better next time,” Bakels said. “For example, if we’ve just completed an event, we walk away from it asking ourselves what we can add. What is that one extra thing?”
According to Bakels, “What was good today isn’t good tomorrow. We’re constantly looking to do better.”
The Team Approach
The staff at Hamilton Farm believes strongly in always looking to improve internally and fosters a culture rooted in teamwork, support and professionalism. This workplace camaraderie is particularly important to Paul Ramina, director of grounds. He worked at Hamilton Farm from 2002 until early 2007, when he took a position elsewhere. But, less than a year later, he decided to return to Hamilton Farm.
“This club is very special to me,” Ramina said. “Tim’s team philosophy is really the core. The individuals here are incredibly good at what they do, but it’s about what we’re all doing, as a team. We all have a common goal about service and giving the best experience possible to our membership and guests.”
To create that “best experience,” the club’s staff meets weekly to discuss individual work philosophies and issues concerning what’s happening around the club. They review specific guests’ likes and dislikes and assess every club function, level of service, and event. They all—from the valets to the director of instruction to the dining room servers—share member feedback in order to pinpoint each small way the club’s services can be improved.
“Having the chance to sit down and talk about what everyone’s doing is so important to me in membership,” said Membership Associate Erin O’Connor, who’s entering her sixth year at the club. “I love seeing the members’ faces light up when they don’t have to ask for something because we’re already on it. I really enjoy the personal relationships with each and every member.”
These personal relationships revolve around the small details, such as leaving cold water bottles in the car when it’s returned from the valet, providing hot cocoa to golfers out on the courses on a cool autumn morning, or setting up a private dining table in the mansion’s library for a couple’s anniversary dinner. O’Connor joked, “If a member wanted us to put a dining table in the locker room, we’d do it, because we’re very flexible to their needs.”
This attention to member needs extends to each arm of the club, from the dining room to the 18th hole. For example, when new executive chef John Rellah came to Hamilton Farm in November, the club hosted a “Meet the Chef” event, during which Rellah visited with members, prepared meals out in the dining room, and talked to his new “customers” about menu preferences and culinary tastes.
“The event was such a success that I was getting calls from members who weren’t even there just to say how excited they were,” O’Connor said.
From Club Favorites to Seven Courses
Rellah is one of the newest additions to Hamilton Farm’s team, but he’s already in tune to the membership’s wants. He recently developed a menu in which one section focuses on simpler fare and club favorites and the other section features a “current, trendy-type cuisine.”
“This way, when you come to the club, you can order a great steak simply prepared or you can enjoy a seven-course, haute dining experience, all off the same menu, all in the same dining room,” Rellah explained. “Again, it comes back to accommodating our members as best we can.”
“We had members saying, ‘If we want a great meal, we have to go to [New York City],’” Bakels said. He believes Rellah’s new menu offerings will now draw Hamilton Farm members to the club instead.
Rellah’s culinary career actually began in New York City, where he met his mentor, Chef Gray Kunz, and trained with him at the famed Lespinasse, a French restaurant in Manhattan’s St. Regis hotel, for nearly five years. His philosophy in the kitchen is simple: establish a strong chain of command, focus on detail, organization, and proper methods of preparation, and work with only the freshest ingredients possible.
To do this at Hamilton Farm, he buys hormone- and antibiotic-free beef and chicken from small boutique farms and fish that’s 12 to 18 hours out of the water from East and West Coast auctions. He taps local farmers for organic vegetables and hand-snipped micro herbs and relies on local dairy farms for artisan cheeses and dairy products. He’s also currently in the process of building a traditional kitchen brigade, complete with a sous chef, chefs de parti, and commis.
“I’m following the truly professional vision that’s being set forth by Tim,” Rellah said. “I’m starting to establish a very high-end quality product here at Hamilton Farm.”
The Hickory and the Highlands Course
The Hamilton Farm staff is equally focused on providing a high-end golfing experience to its members.
The club has two courses, the Highlands course, an 18-hole, 7,100-yard championship course, and the Hickory, an 18-hole 3,000-yard “short course,” both designed by Dr. Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry. The Hickory course is the only USGA-rated par-3 course in the world—even Tiger Woods didn’t break par when he played it.
“The Hickory course is like a little jewel. It’s a great course to work on your short game, and you pull out every club in your bag,” Ramina explained. “And the way the course routing takes advantage of the property’s natural elements is just beautiful.”
Always looking to improve, the club is currently undertaking a massive renovation project on its bunkers. New liners will be installed to hold the sand on the bunker faces and reduce stone migration to the surface. Also, the original natural-fiber material used in the bunkers has degraded. So, the club is replacing it with a synthetic fiber with longer shelf life.
“The bunkers are very big and imposing, and the architecture of them is very unique, with lots of fingers and movement,” Ramina said. “We’re very proud of our bunkers and just want to be sure we’re doing the best to maintain them.”
The club is also very proud of its new director of instruction Mike Adams, a 20-year golf industry veteran. Recognized as one of Golf Digest’s “Top 50” instructors in the world and one of Golf Magazine’s “Top 100” instructors, Adams is a private instructor to more than 100 PGA, LPGA and Senior Tour players.
“Not only is Mike Adams impressive on paper,” Bakels said, “when he’s on the lesson tee, everyone he’s speaking to is just mesmerized.” But, being a teamplayer, Bakels also praised the strength of the entire grounds staff, many of whom, such as Matt Freitag, director of golf, were on board before he arrived.
“The team here is made up of true professionals,” he said. “Not only are they understanding of their own department’s direction and operation, but they’re also very respectful and appreciative of directors and managers in other departments.”
“The ownership has given us vision and is clearly showing support,” Bakels added. “And now the club’s day-to-day management team is becoming much more cohesive and excited about the level of service we’re prepared to offer.”
Marique Newell is NCA’s managing editor.
A Glance at Hamilton Farm’s History
Although Hamilton Farm Golf Club in Gladstone, N.J., opened in 2001, Hamilton Farm’s history reaches back to the early 20th century.
Today, the club sits on a 600-acre spread once home to James Cox Brady, a wealthy New York financier, and his family. At its zenith, the property, purchased in 1911, spanned three counties in northern New Jersey and 5,000 acres of farmland, pastures, and formal gardens.
The Brady’s first built a small hunting lodge on the property to live in as they constructed their country home. The lodge still stands and serves as a fully furnished, four-suite guest home that Hamilton Farm Golf Club members may rent.
Shortly after its completion, the Brady’s home burned to the ground in 1923, and a new brick house was then built on the same site. Gutted by a 1978 fire, the house was rebuilt within the original walls and is now a 64-room Georgian mansion, featuring 11 fireplaces, a vast collection of rare antiques—including a Chippendale piece whose only other twin resides in Buckingham Palace—and handpicked chandeliers, fixtures, and Italian marble. The mansion also has 10 private guestrooms Hamilton Farm Golf Club members may enjoy.
The property’s large 50-stall stable, home to the Brady family’s Hackney ponies and Percheron draft horses, was constructed in 1916 and featured carriage rooms, corridors and harness rooms with tile walls, terrazzo floors and brass fittings. In the 1960s, James Cox Brady Jr.—a close friend of Whitney Stone, then-chairman of the United States Equestrian Team—invited the U.S.E.T. to come to Hamilton Farm. To this day, the team still houses its horses there.
In 1978, Beneficial Corporation purchased the property from the Brady family to use as a retreat and conference center. In 1998, Lucent Technologies took over, with plans to develop an ultra-exclusive golf club, with two golf courses, a clubhouse, and 18 guest cottages, one for each of the corporate members.
In June 2001, Townsend Capital LLC bought Hamilton Farm and promptly converted the property into a private, invitation-only club for members. Currently, the club, whose average member age is 49, has nearly 200 members, with a cap of 350.