Expanding upon my work for a proposed Winter Sports Facility, I was asked to present to the Board of Governors of The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, a conceptual design for a major renovation of the Club House Building.  Founded in 1882, The Country Club is the oldest golf-oriented country club in the United States and holds a storied position in golf history.  It also has a storied architectural history.  The Club’s 236 acre campus began as a farm, and many decades and many additions later, the original Federalist-style farmhouse had expanded significantly to include a large ballroom, multiple dining rooms, living rooms, meeting rooms, two kitchens, and staff offices and living quarters, all flanked by extensive porches with commanding views of the grounds.

         The south section of the building — containing the Grill Room and Library — had recently been updated, so I focused on the north portion of the Club House.   In examining the programmatic functions of the building, it was immediately obvious that the main ballroom presented a major obstacle for food service: meals would either have to be delivered from the kitchen through the empty ballroom — if it wasn’t in use — or taken down into the basement, carried through labyrinthine passageways, then brought back up to the ground floor to be served at table.  This wasn’t an elegant or ideal situation.  Furthermore, the scale of the ballroom was far too large for its ten-foot ceiling height.  The room felt like an overgrown function hall in a second-rate hotel, versus a high-ceilinged ballroom in one of America’s preeminent private clubs.

         Drawing inspiration from the Germantown Cricket Club — where architects McKim, Mead & White placed the ballroom/theatre on the second floor, thereby taking advantage of the height under the eaves — I decided to move the ballroom to the second floor.  This solved multiple problems and created great opportunities for various Club functions.  I restored the north portion of the ballroom and turned it back into a dining room, in this case a cozy “Winter” Dining Room with a large fireplace inglenook and a curved bay looking out towards the grounds.  The “Summer” Dining Room is an improved version of the existing Dining Room — which is essentially a glassed-in porch — but with added decorative elements (beams, pilasters, etc.) to clean up and highlight the architectural features of the space.  Circulation patterns have been clarified with major halls aligned with existing hallways and the addition of a large coat room and expansion of the existing bathrooms and kitchen while significantly increases the functionality.  

          On the second floor, I tucked the large Ballroom under the existing roof — allowing the large barrel-vaulted ceiling to take advantage of the space under the eaves while still preventing the massive room from overwhelming the scale of the rest of the building.  A large Palladian door/window provides access to the large balcony beyond, allowing it to be used for events when the weather allows, and there’s a proper Minstrels’ Gallery at the south end of the room.   The overall design draws upon existing Federalist-style architectural idioms: white painted wood trim, yellow painted clapboard, bluestone and brick paving, multi-pane double-hung windows, and shingle roofs — so all that is new is seamlessly integrated into the historical fabric of the existing structure.