Felixstowe Ferry Golf Club in Suffolk, England, Expects Living-Roof Clubhouse Around Christmas
England’s fifth-oldest golf club is finishing a 1,020-square-meter clubhouse with a sloped living roof and a public café. The opening has moved from September to around Christmas 2026.
On the Suffolk coast of eastern England, the town of Felixstowe looks out across the North Sea. Felixstowe Ferry Golf Club is preparing to move into a new clubhouse set under a sloped living roof. The club had aimed to open the 1,020-square-meter building, roughly 11,000 square feet, in September. It now looks to open around Christmas 2026, the East Anglian Daily Times reports.
Ipswich-based contractor SEH French, which broke ground on the project in January 2025, is constructing the multi-million-pound clubhouse from a design by the architects Wincer Kievenaar. Phil Branton, a director at Wincer Kievenaar, has said the goal was to join the club’s history with a forward-looking building that fits its place.
The living roof is the building’s main gesture, a planted surface intended to help a sizable new building settle into the links landscape. Branton has spoken of working within a National Landscape and of harmonizing the clubhouse with its surroundings. SEH French notes that the coastal site carries that protected designation, formerly called an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The clubhouse also holds an A+ energy rating and an array of solar panels to run its operations.
The most public part of the building is Café 1880, named for the year the club was founded. The club describes the café as open to all, and the building will also include public toilets, giving walkers, families and other visitors to this stretch of coast a reason to stop whether or not they play golf.
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Mick Thomas, the club’s chair, has linked the project to that history. “We are incredibly proud of our heritage as the fifth oldest club in England,” he said, pointing to nearly 150 years of golf at Felixstowe Ferry and to a clubhouse meant to serve the wider community as well as members.
The path to this point has been lengthy. The project has had to navigate planning and consultation, the possibility of a judicial process, the pandemic and rising costs, and the latest delay moves the opening from September to the end of the year. The same scheme includes Balfour Place, five homes with sea and course views that come with club memberships.
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Woodhall Spa Golf Club in Lincolnshire, England, is building a new clubhouse designed by G1 Architects to give its members a purpose-built home for the game. The Mid Ocean Club in Bermuda is a coastal heritage club with a clubhouse renovation of its own. Both are answering the practical question of what a historic club needs from its buildings while staying true to its setting.
The new clubhouse matters because it asks a historic links to do more than host golf. A club founded in 1880 is giving itself a new home in an energy-efficient building under a living roof, and it is opening that building to its neighbors through a public café and public facilities. When it opens, Felixstowe Ferry will approach its 150th year with a clubhouse that belongs as much to the Suffolk coast as to its members.
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