Know Who You Are, Then Build It

A clubhouse is never neutral. The moment it opens, it’s already making a statement: the materials, the layout, the light, the size of the bar relative to the dining room. All of it tells a member something about who the club is and who it’s for, whether or not anyone meant to say it.

A clubhouse can look expensive and still feel impersonal. It can look traditional and still be trying to welcome a member who joined last year. Members pick up on that mismatch even when they can’t name it: the sense that the building is saying one thing while the website, the welcome letter, and the way staff talk about the place are saying another.

I spend my career on one half of that equation: the language, the color, the promise a club makes and keeps. The other half, the space itself, is a craft I don’t practice, so I talk often with people who do. Howard Kuo of KDC Architects has spent three decades designing clubhouses and resorts, and something he told me put words to an idea I’d carried for a while.

“The brand is there,” he said. “It just needs to be uncovered and then shined up and polished, and displayed in a proper way.”

He spends his career reading rooms the way I spend mine reading language, and he was describing the same thing I would: a club without a stated identity isn’t a club without an identity. It’s a club whose identity nobody’s bothered to name yet, which is a different, and far more fixable, problem.

On his side, that means the slow, methodical work Kuo calls extracting a club’s DNA: studying every corner of the property, talking with members and with staff who’ve worked there for twenty years, before a single line gets drawn. On mine, it means sitting with a board, reading member surveys, asking dozens of small questions about what the club is proud of, before a word of the identity gets written. Neither of us is comfortable skipping that first step, because skipping it is exactly how you end up with a building, or an identity, that technically works and still feels like it belongs to someone else.

The Cost of Working in Isolation

Here’s where the two crafts tend to fall out of step: they happen without talking to each other. Clubs often build the clubhouse and shape the club’s identity as two separate projects, on two different timelines, without the people doing one keeping the other in view. The building goes up. The committee picks finishes and furniture. Somewhere down the road, someone notices the club still sounds, in its website and its member communications, like whatever it happened to say ten, or twenty, or even thirty years ago, and that the language, the colors, and the new space have stopped telling the same story.

I’ve seen the disconnect firsthand. After finishing a full identity initiative for one club, clarifying who they were, who they were for, and what the next decade should look like, the president told me he wished he’d brought us in before he hired the firm that had recently designed several club facility renovations, not because that work was wrong, but because the architect had done careful, excellent work without the one document that would have told them exactly what story the club wanted to tell. The clarity arrived only after the decisions that mattered most were already made.

That’s not an argument for hiring an identity firm before an architect out of habit. It’s an argument for making sure the two conversations happen together instead of in sequence by accident. A club that can say who it is before the first sketch gives its architect something to build toward, instead of something to reverse-engineer once the building is already standing.

When the Two Line Up

Kuo brought up a club as an example, without my prompting: Frenchman’s Creek, where Peacock + Lewis, part of the same ownership group as his own firm, designed a clubhouse that Golf Inc. recently named Clubhouse of the Year. Sussner had already built the club’s overall identity and carried it through to individual identities for the clubhouse’s restaurants. What Kuo noticed was more than the impressive building itself. It was that the identity work tracked with where the membership was heading: younger, more lifestyle-driven, less interested in tradition for its own sake.

That’s what it looks like when the two crafts line up, not because one firm built the whole project, but because the story being told through language and color pointed in the same direction the space itself was already moving.

Where This Leaves You

If your club is standing at the start of a capital project, long before the first drawing, there’s a question worth answering first: could you say, in one sentence, who the club is and who it’s for, not a mission statement per se, but an answer specific enough and inspirational enough that an architect, a marketing director, and a board member would all build toward the same thing?

Getting to that sentence is its own discipline, and it looks a lot like the discipline on the architecture side: the hard part isn’t deciding what to add. It’s having the patience to cut what isn’t essential, and the confidence to leave the result simple instead of padding it to look more thorough.

You don’t need two firms in the room to ask the question, and you don’t need to answer it before you’ve picked a single finish or fixture. You need to ask it before the drawings start, not after, and you need an answer specific enough that it would change what ends up on paper.

Everyone circling a capital project, architect included, is already doing work worth being proud of. A clubhouse doesn’t need an identity initiative to be excellent, and a renovation doesn’t need a marketing plan behind it to succeed. What changes when the two conversations happen together isn’t whether the building turns out well. It’s whether the story the building tells matches the one the club means to tell. That’s the same question this piece started with: not whether the clubhouse is impressive, but whether the members walking through it feel it was built with them in mind.

This article draws from Episode 119 of Clubs Made Meaningful, a conversation with Howard Kuo, AIA, principal and co-founder of Kuo Diedrich Chi Architects (KDC), who has spent three decades designing clubhouses and resorts.

Listen here, watch here.

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