To look at the Bel-Air Bay Club—to admire its white stucco walls and terracotta roofs, to feel its ocean breezes—is to slip into a California reverie.
Try as you may, you won’t easily shake this feeling. White sands and blue waters, the far-off view of sails. Palm trees, of course. Even the road that winds through the club’s grounds, the iconic Pacific Coast Highway, conjures in our imagination a California that is classic and timeless.
Yet, for its members—a full-capacity 850—Bel-Air’s physical beauty is no abstract ideal but rather an integral part of a chosen lifestyle. Whether Californian by birth or inclination, this young, vibrant and family-orientated crowd requires a club that blends family and fun, recreation and relaxation.
Bel-Air Bay Club … maybe we had you with the name, but let us tell you more.
At A Glance
Situated in Pacific Palisades—well within the LA orbit, but comfortably nestled along Santa Monica Bay—the Bel-Air Bay Club bridges the modern, often hectic lifestyle of the cosmopolitan metropolis with the casual and the stress-reducing balm that proximity to the beach magically provides.
But Californians, for all the stereotypes of Hollywood glamour and laid-back affluence are not so different from you and me. They just have better weather.
No doubt, the prime beachfront location combining with an accommodating climate suits the members’ outdoor, active lifestyles. All these things are important ingredients to this club’s success. But the deeper story we find here is that the Bel-Air Bay Club works to create and enlarge a mission and purpose that is unabashedly modern. Many clubs try to wear the mantle of family friendliness, but few work as hard or sustain the intention to be family oriented as persistently as do the members of Bel-Air Bay Club
“The main thrust of what we do here involves just asking ourselves, ‘Is this family friendly?’ and, if not, ‘Can we make it that way?’” explains Samantha LaDue, director of communications at the club for past four years. For LaDue, such a focus entails “an awareness of who your membership is and what they need, all the way down to the individual level.”
What’s for Dinner?
The dining room at some private clubs can be a generational minefield.
The trend toward more casual dining preferences has brought a proliferation of needs and wants—from eat-and-run to graze-and-wander—that more traditionalist sensibilities may find unpalatable. An older couple seeking a quiet and intimate dinner, for instance, may well be distracted by the hurly-burly displayed by the young family at the nearby table. Putting the varying tastes and changing needs of different members side-by-side almost inevitably introduces strains.
But Bel-Air, for its part, has managed to adapt and thrive despite these sometime trying circumstances.
Issuing a survey to their members in 2007, Bel Air found that the dining experience for many families was not a fully inviting one. With its adult-oriented menu and more formal ambiance, the main dining room powerfully telegraphed its preference for patrons who were, well, more inclined to stay in their chairs.
So what did Bel-Air do?
Well, it started with the design and introduction of a children’s menu [see sidebar]. Bel-Air’s take on the genre adopts the standard menu format with puzzles and games, but adds to it the unique flavor of their beachside locale. Cartooned crustaceans and broad-beaked birds guide the young diners through a word search here, a crayon coloring there, leading them to their options for simple, friendly fare.
More than just a helpful accommodation for kids, the children’s menu invites families in and reassures them that their presence is welcome and not merely tolerated.
Hitting that point home, Bel-Air took the further step of assembling an outdoor dining area tailored specifically for families, an ocean-facing patio where children can roam and parents can grab a quick bite.
The dining areas now hum daily with diners of all stripes. But recall, it was not always so.
Thus Samatha’s essential questions: Was the dining experience at Bel-Air family friendly? Not so much. Could they make it make it that way? Yes. And well they did.
Branding Bocce
“I think one of the best things we do for our membership is work toward low cost, high-interaction activities that anybody can do,” LaDue says.
Typical activities at Bel-Air that fit this billing, by turns practical and social, include the paddle tennis program, beach volleyball and bridge. No reservations required and no time constraints imposed. And families appreciate it.
But it is on one of the Bel-Air’s many bocce courts—yes, bocce—that this strategy comes alive most vividly.
Bocce—that folksy Italian game in which players under-arm toss a larger ball towards a small target one—may seem more suited to cobbled walks of Rome than to the patio’s of Southern California.
But the ease of striking up a game with friends and family coupled with the casual, social rhythms of its play, suggested to Bel-Air’s leaders that bocce would be a hit.
And they were right.
Bocce games are now a regular and inviting sight out on Bel-Air’s patio, which, like so many other places around the club, overlooks the Pacific Ocean. As with other club activities, organized bocce events are planned with a view towards flexible timing, allowing participants to arrive late or early at their discretion. On non-event days, kids and adults, men and women, congregate here to play a game or have a chat, the low thud of bocce balls colliding sounding nearby.
Market Segmentation or Different Strokes for Different Folks
Many of Bel-Air’s offerings project an air of inclusiveness and sociability geared toward families. But for many kids, especially older ones bound up in their own expanding social circle, “family-friendly” buzz might as well signal an attack on their fledgling independence.
Mindful of children’s need for peer interaction, Bel-Air’s activities committee has over the years carefully and persistently reached out to different youth segments, tethering important aspects of their social experience to club life.
For kids in their teens this may include sports, tournaments and the like, as well as other more specialized activities.
Lifeguard training, for instance, is a popular course among teens that generates as much enthusiasm as it imparts skills.
Similarly the “can’t miss” social events are likely to vary by age. The younger set has a strong preference for Halloween and its rite-of-passage haunted house. Kids old enough to face the ghoulish and macabre display delight in its arrival, while kids too young tug at their parent’s clothing, crane their necks, and imagine what lies behind closed doors, all the while trick-or-treating through 104 club cabanas.
GM Bill Howard says it is his favorite event of the year. “The entire community—every segment—gets in on the fun and participates by dressing up, decorating their cabana and providing candy for the kids.”
The upshot is that Bel-Air provides the children and youth of its members with some of their most memorable and lasting impressions, all with the ever-present ocean as a satisfying backdrop. Families know this and that its one of the principal reasons they keep coming back.
California Casual
Bel-Air knows its members well both as individuals and as part of the larger social network—from families to seniors to tweens—with defined interests and needs, some diverging here and converging there. Holding an ear to the ground for each of these diverse segments, Bel-Air has sculpted its identity in their image. It’s a uniquely American expression–casual, breezy and sun-drenched. And so this southern Californian lifestyle finds its inimitable expression with the Bel-Air Bay Club evoking its own distinctive brand of California Dreamin’.
Club Trends Spring 2014