Belleair Country Club
Belleair, Florida, USA
Belleair Country Club — the oldest golf club in Florida; a layout so nice, Donald Ross designed it twice — has always boasted a history and lineage unmatched in the American South. Refurbished by Fry/Straka and reopened in November 2022, today the club boasts the most striking, to-the-letter Ross restoration anywhere in the United States. What drew Donald Ross to the site in 1915 (then back again, less than a decade later) remains very much in evidence today: topography and terrain. Most Florida courses are famously flat. The renovated West Course, what Ross called the #1 Course, features some 30 feet of elevation change, set beside half a mile of frontage on Clearwater Bay. This tableau, the original Ross plans, and Fry/Straka’s nuanced refurbishment approach together enabled a restoration of staggering accuracy and scope. It's also drop-dead gorgeous.
“To have a course where Ross was on site so many times, for the initial design, and then for the remodel of his own work 10 years later? That’s incredibly rare,” Jason Straka says. “To have such detailed construction drawings — and notes in the man’s own hand? That’s rarer still. What it allowed, on one level, is the elimination of guess work: We basically took all the plans from 1915 and 1924 and turned them into modern construction drawings. What Ross specified, we built. The man’s own cross-section drawings and notes told us exactly how to construct them!”
Ross returned here in 1924 with the intention to make the West Course much more difficult. “I’m sure he succeeded there,” Straka says. “However, in restoring that private club design, in 2022, we have made the layout far more user-friendly. Yes, we re-exposed so many ravines and streams that had been filled in over the years. However, by following the Ross plans, most of the greens today play at grade. We also expanded all the fairways back to their intended width — fully 50 percent wider.”
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Sports Illustrated:
Best Golden Age East Coast Private Course Renovation - 2022Golf Digest:
Best Transformation, Runner-Up - 2023Golfweek:
Top 100 Classic Courses in the USA - #77
Best in State (Private) - #4
Awards & Rankings reflect highest ranking throughout course history
Photos by Evan Schiller