With more than 6,000 members, six 18-hole golf courses, seven restaurants, four clubhouses, and a fitness center Olympian in its proportions, the sheer size of The Landings Club—a gated community located on Skidaway Island, 15 miles from Savannah, Georgia—might obscure its deeper, more defining qualities.
Indeed, for all its scale and surface appeal, The Landings is fundamentally about its people. Their lives. Their health. Their passions. Originally envisioned as a retiree community for golfers, the club has evolved, variously by design and by chance, into a thriving multi-generational hub for both families and snowbirds, locals and transplants, golfers and the rest alike.
It may strike the casual observer as an unsteady balance, this demographic and lifestyle melting pot, representing, as it does, so many different dreams and destinations. But The Landings philosophy is an encompassing one that calms these waters: to be a tight-knit community unto itself, one that nurtures individuals of any age and nudges them forward to life’s next exciting passage.
A Reimagining
Little did anyone dream, only a decade ago, that such a transformation was possible.
For almost 30 years, since its inception in the mid 70s, The Landings held fast to their founding model as a retiree golf club. What places this club’s story outside of the traditional success narrative—problem, solution, resolution—is that this model worked and worked well. Attracting its senior members and residents mainly from colder, more northerly locales, the balmy island community prospered.
The story here then lies in steering change and breaking molds, in taking the reigns when opportunities that did not present themselves at first suddenly beckon.
Destinies and Accidents
“You’d like to be able to say that it was strategic, but it wasn’t,” observes the club’s executive director, Steven Freund. Arriving at The Landings four years ago, Freund has absorbed the lessons of his predecessors; that coupled with his 34 years’ experience working in the hotel industry, have taught him a thing or two about hospitality and the fast-moving tides that shaped today’s community.
Talking with Freund, one feels the shift in the club’s core demographic was something of a happy accident, albeit a well-managed one.
It helped that the long-delayed construction of the Truman Parkway, a major traffic artery linking Skidaway Island to its charming and stately Savannah nerve center, finally wrapped up. Moving at a good clip, you can now make the trip in twenty minutes—about half the time it used to take. Overnight, The Landings became a viable home for commuting professionals.
But perhaps the greatest accelerator of the club’s good fortune was simply an image and an idea.
The sight of so many grandchildren enjoying the area on visits, the evident glee of their arrival reflected in their grandparent’s happy faces, kindled in the minds of club management something grander. No curmudgeons, these older members.
About these grandparents, Freund says: “They wanted to live in a place their grandchildren would want to visit, because they believed grandma and grandpa lived in the coolest place in the world.”
From that observation, the club realized that catering to retirees and younger families were twin goals, one and the same.
Taking Control
The shift in The Landings’ thinking impelled the club’s leadership, at first, to put in a playground here, a swing set there, but as the vision of a future Skidaway emerged, free from the constraints of any generational straightjacket, more lasting improvements followed.
“We had to have features, amenities, and benefits that appealed to all seasons of potential members’ lives,” Freund says.
A snapshot of these diverse offerings would of course include the top flight golf offering, tennis facility, and fitness center, with all their attendant, age-specific programming. But more vividly: Pickleball (think, fevered badminton played with hard paddles and wiffle balls), a more than 100-foot-long snaking pool slide (a dual slide will be added in 2014—one flume of 143 feet and a faster, steeper 98-inch “tube”), local produce excursions, a lecture series, and “mommy and me” pool classes.
Such unique, trending and niche infrastructure and programming serves as much to encourage greater member participation as it does to attract prospective members. The out-of-town friend, the school chum guest, the relatives in town for weekend: for them, a visit to The Landings leaves a lasting impression that just might flip to a new plan for the future.
Heel and step, club management continued to expand the amenities for its retiree base, mindful of their evolving needs as well. Its immensely popular and well-received Life Extension and Fulfillment (LEAF) program encourages staying out in front of the aging process through healthy eating, exercise and keeping informed. LEAF’s regular seminar and lobby talks cover a range of topics including memory enhancement, nutrition, surgical advances, even acupuncture.
Looking ahead, The Landings aims to build on this program’s success by offering concierge medicine, on-site health services (clinics, rehabilitation centers, prescription drug filling and the like) and closer collaboration with Savannah’s hospitals and health care centers.
The Island of Much More
The Landings remembers its origins as a club that didn’t insulate its retiree base, but instead facilitated their entry into a new and enriching chapter of their lives.
“A lot of the folks who moved here were saying, ‘OK, I no longer want that corporate grind, but I want to live in a place where I’m still stimulated intellectually and spiritually.’ Part of our vision was and is to create that fulfilling lifestyle,” Freund says.
The Landings puts this philosophy into practice today across its membership segments. More than 100 social or community-related organizations—spanning such diverse pursuits as its Birdwatchers group to its Automobile Society, all the way to The Landings own Interfaith Hospitality Network—ensure that residents can develop their hobbies and interests while at the same time forging new friendships. The proliferation of these groups reflect both the residents diverse interests and active lifestyles, as well as the club’s commitment to fostering lasting relationships and deeper community ties.
Secluded but not remote, The Landings prides itself on the lives their residents lead off the island, too. Playing an outsized leadership role in many of Savannah’s renowned cultural institutions and accounting for some 30 percent of all philanthropic giving in the metropolitan area (despite comprising only five percent of its population), many residents maintain a dynamic and far-reaching influence on their community, within and without.
Who Fortune Favors
Here then is a pleasant paradox at the core of The Landings: the flourishing of its community over the years, in its diversity and scale, was not planned, and yet nearly everything about this coastal idyll bears the imprint of a grand and far-seeing design.
This paradox resolves itself when we remember that sometimes we make our own luck. The leaders of The Landings never tied themselves to any one vision or rigid way of doing things. No, they held their finger to the wind, conscious that the right moments can come and go, and that it is the prepared who seize them.
The Landings seized their moment and built this vibrant community to embrace a newer, more encompassing vision. Further afield, new tides will come, and the smart money would wager that when they do, The Landings “luck” will last.
Club Trends Spring 2014