Extreme Makeover Planned for Bent Tree Country Club

Back in Bent Tree Country Club’s glory days, Nancy Lopez and Beth Daniels more than once strode triumphantly down its 18th fairway, notching wins on the Ladies PGA Tour.

Now, a decade later and with an $8.5-million infusion of cash from Whitehall Quality Homes, the private club in Sarasota, Fla., plans to recapture that aura. The keystone: a golf course redesign by Steve Smyers Golf Course Architects of Lakeland, Fla. Along with three Golfweek Top 100 golf courses, Smyers has performed auspicious renovations of Isleworth Golf & Country Club in Windemere, home to a dozen PGA Tour players, Marriott’s Grand Pines in Orlando and Plantation Bay’s Club de Bonmont in Ormond Beach.

While Smyers and design partner Patrick Andrews are rebuilding Bent Tree’s golf course, the club is overseeing improvements to its clubhouse and cart barn and replacing its tennis complex, fitness center and swimming pool with new designed amenities by The Evans Group out of Orlando, Fla.

“Our intention,” said director of golf Mark Bruce, “is to take Bent Tree’s tradition to a higher level. We want Steve Smyers Golf Course Architects to bring the course up to date from the standpoints of agronomy, irrigation, drainage and maintenance.”

Pointing to a slowdown in new golf course starts since 2000 because of saturation, Bruce added: “This is a way to re-establish ourselves as the premier club in Sarasota. In the 1980s and early- to mid-’90s we were the premiere facility, with the LPGA being here 13 years. Now we’re 10 years past our heyday and we’re ready to get back on the right track with this capital infusion.”

Jerry Andrews, who oversaw a number of golf course acquisitions and renovations before joining Whitehall as a partner, said his company will build 136 housing units, including two-story park villa condos and carriage houses, to “complement Bent Tree with housing that will generate new members for the club.”

The new club lodging, he said, is expected to host members, guests, visiting members and snowbirds who want to stay at Bent Tree and play golf. Seventy percent of the club’s 240 members are from the Northern U.S. and Canada. The community currently includes 976 homes, three-fourths of them single-family, but homes do not abut the golf course, giving it a feel of a “core” layout.

Bent Tree’s golf course “is an exceptional property but basically very tired and we think we can restore it back to the original transparent value it had in the 1970s,” Andrews added.

The Renovation Committee chose Smyers for the challenge because, Bruce said, “everything that I’ve played that Steve built is well done – Southern Dunes (Haines City, Fla.), Old Memorial (Tampa, Fla.), Wolf Run (Zionsville, Ind.). He has a unique sense of blending the surroundings and the environment with how the golf course plays. He doesn’t try to recreate things.”

With the redesign, Bent Tree CC is targeting a different market than other golf courses in the area, Smyers said. “We’re going after strong golfers rather than the upper-end country-club set. We will appeal to a broad base of golfers.”

Whereas the edges of the golf course now “leak into the surrounding property, giving it an uncontained feeling,” he added, “We will produce strong edges, integrating the native landscape into the golf course.”

In the process, Smyers and Andrews will reroute the entire golf course and “create a new golf course where the old one stood, adding strategic values that don’t exist there now.”

“Patrick and I will create a beautiful native landscape setting, using some nice old oak hammocks on the property and developing new lakes with native Florida habitat while still developing interesting and strategic shot-making. In the end, Bent Tree’s natural setting will flow strikingly with the golf,” Smyers said.

Bruce, in his fifth year at Bent Tree, said the club plans to go out to bid for a golf course builder in December or January, start construction next April and reopen the golf course November 15 or December 1, 2007. The clubhouse renovation – called “an extreme makeover” by Bruce – and other ancillary facilities will be built at the same time. “We’re anticipating the club will be shut down a full 12 months,” Andrews said.

Andrews concluded, “The finished product is going to be extremely attractive to old and new members. Steve and Patrick possess tremendous traditional golf-design values. They seem to have such a broad perspective of what goes into a golf course, more so than anybody with whom I’ve been associated.”