Kingsley Club is replacing its trailer clubhouse with a Finlay Cotswolds house
Escalante said in June it has broken ground on a new clubhouse at Kingsley Club in Kingsley, Michigan, which has used a retrofitted construction trailer since 2001. Mark P. Finlay Architects is designing a 4,000-square-foot Cotswolds house behind the ninth green for spring 2027.
Escalante Golf said in June that it has started work on a new clubhouse at Kingsley Club, the private course in Kingsley, Michigan, about 15 minutes south of Traverse City, that has greeted members from a retrofitted construction trailer since Mike DeVries's 18 holes opened in 2001.
The house is by Mark P. Finlay Architects. Escalante's June 24 release said the 4,000-square-foot building, plus an 850-square-foot covered patio, will sit on the same site behind the ninth green as the trailer, with a design drawn from the English Cotswolds. The club expects it to open in spring 2027.
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Finlay's own Kingsley project page still lists the job. The firm describes a Cotswold-inspired building meant to stay small for a membership that came for the golf, not a palace. That is the confirmation, two months later, that Finlay still holds the commission. Escalante's release is the source for the rooms it is willing to name: expanded indoor and outdoor dining, a full-service bar, an outdoor fire pit, a larger pro shop, locker rooms with private wet rooms, and a bigger practice green next to the house. This desk is not inventing other interiors.
Escalante bought the club in 2022 from co-founders Ed Walker and Art Preston and has kept the "Spirit of the Game" line the founders used. General manager Justin Mack said the project is "about evolution, not change." Local station 9and10 News interviewed him on June 29 and he repeated the spring 2027 clubhouse date.
The clubhouse is one piece of a larger spend. Escalante put the whole expansion at about $40 million, including a second 18 on 520 newly acquired acres southeast of the existing property. Forbes and Golfweek named Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw on that course. Tree clearing began in early 2026. Limited preview play is listed for late 2028, with a full opening in 2029. That work is context. The building that belongs on this site is the Finlay house.
Escalante's June release said it had already broken ground on the clubhouse. Tony Paul at The Detroit News, writing the same day, used the same line. Independent local television five days later talked to Mack about the expansion and did not show a foundation. The photographs that traveled with the announcement were aerials of the DeVries course and dirt on the new land, not vertical work on the house. Treat the groundbreaking as Escalante's June statement, not a walkthrough from this desk. A 4,000-square-foot house that replaces a trailer is a different job from the Frontier Club plan sheet outside Detroit, or from Five Ponds in Pennsylvania, where a municipal course is borrowing $25 million for a much larger rebuild. Kingsley is trying to get members out of a construction trailer without losing the scale that made the place feel like a golf club first. That is a clubhouses story.
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