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Renewal at The Country Club of Detroit

The Country Club of Detroit (CCD) has a storied past that extends across three centuries. The club was founded in 1897 just outside the burgeoning city of Detroit, which then had a population of about 250,000.

The first clubhouse for the CCD was essentially a consolidation of several other small clubs in this exclusive enclave. One of those clubs, the Grosse Pointe Club, had previously built a clubhouse that the new Country Club of Detroit made its own. With many lovely features, the veranda was a favorite, and, being adjacent to the dining hall, was used as an outdoor dining room. Clearly, what goes around comes around in the club world.

A new clubhouse was built in 1905 under the direction of renowned architect Albert Kahn and then another in 1923 (also designed by Kahn), which, in turn, was largely destroyed by a fire just two years later. The third clubhouse was replaced by an architectural gem designed by the Detroit firm of Smith, Hinchman & Grylls. Though the clubhouse is often the club’s social center, it can also be a flashpoint for debate and discussion about a club’s future and its guiding mission.

The clubhouse’s evolution is testimony to not only CCD’s resilience, but also its ability to adapt. In the early part of the twentieth century, golf started to compete with and even overshadow what had been the historic role of boating and lakefront activities at the club. Understandably, the location and design of the clubhouse became an issue that highlighted conflicting views of the club’s future.

Thus the role of the clubhouse and, more generally, the facilities is one that boards, managements and members will likely face on multiple occasions. Finding the right path though competing needs and visions, applying scare resources and then sorting multiple priorities requires clear vision, sound planning and careful decision-making.

In more recent years, the tough economic environment that hit the Detroit area especially hard in 2008 became the focus for CCD management and leadership.

Setting New Standards

The club realized that its facilities and the offerings it supported needed not only to satisfy the existing membership, but to also provide a compelling offering to attract new members—all in an affluent area with many choices for dining, recreation and socializing. General Manager and COO Craig Cutler puts it this way, “Looking at its options for the future, the club came to realize that the cost of doing nothing would be very high.”

The club embarked on a set of phased improvements that in many respects was undertaken for members not yet there. What planners had in mind was a full-service offering that would not only delight current members—some of them with a CCD family tradition that stretched across three or four generations—but would also be a compelling complement to new families with expectations for a broad range of premium lifestyle options.

The leadership at CCD set its sights high: to become the premier country club in Michigan. This required doing more: offering greater value and satisfaction to its current membership, having the capacity to attract new members in a competitive environment that already offered many attractive options, and developing a stronger financial foundation for the club that would maintain a reasonable cost of membership. The key to this ambitious plan was to enhance its physical facilities and thereby serve more members with a broader range of services throughout the entire calendar year.

Creating a Village

Phase I of this long-term plan completed in 2015 looked beyond the current golf and clubhouse configuration and focused on developing an array of pool and racquet facilities that were positioned on the club’s lower campus. One building came down, but four went up in what the members call “The Summer Village.” The village combines a resort-style pool with a poolside grill and includes a revamped racquet sports center that supports tennis in the summer and paddle in the winter.

The stately clubhouse has remained a signature symbol of the club, but the delightful village has become a new center of gravity and hub of activity. The pool deck has nearly tripled in size as new water features attract a bevy of club members during the Michigan summers. The snack window has been displaced by full-service poolside dining, which has exploded in popularity increasing food and beverage sales at this one location by several multiples. The attrition of membership has been dramatically reversed with more than 200 members joining CCD since work on the ambitious project was undertaken. A big part of the attraction is that the club no longer shuts down during the long Michigan winter. Members can enjoy the Summer Village during the warmth of summer and move inside for casual dining, bowling and fitness over the winter months.

Rejuvenating the Clubhouse

Phase II takes the momentum inside the clubhouse with a dramatic refashioning of its historic and very popular bowling center. The removal of a dropped ceiling has revealed a Depression-era vaulted ceiling, while some creative design coupled with highly skilled engineering (so as not to alter the footprint or historical architecture of the clubhouse), has delivered a spectacular multi-level facility that combines bowling, fitness and ample social space. This phase of development is just now concluding. With the change of season coinciding with the project’s completion, the club anticipates high rates of utilization: outdoor dining can shift to the indoor casual dining option, bowling continues to draw the club together, and the addition of a fully staffed and programmed fitness center will further add energy and variety to what has in the past been the “off-season.”

New Possibilities

Although the private club industry has experienced some retrenchment in its recent history, the Country Club of Detroit is a powerful example of how clubs with a respected reputation and enduring traditions can assert continued relevance and value to the next generation. It is a marketing truism that while products and services can and do vary in their precise expressions; the human needs that drive the demand for them are typically enduring.

In a free market economy, with its emphasis on innovation and the proliferation of choice, clubs can expect that competition will remain brisk for the lifestyle and associational needs on which clubs have historically had such a strong hold. But, clubs have great advantages as they seek to extend their unique combination of privacy and personalized service, offered up in environments that set new standards of excellence and enjoyment. In smartly adapting to the trends shaping society, the Country Club of Detroit is creating a rewarding future for its growing membership.

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