Royal Dornoch’s £13.9 Million Clubhouse in the Scottish Highlands Gains a Black Walnut Table From North Carolina Members
At Royal Dornoch in the Scottish Highlands, Keppie Design’s £13.9m clubhouse is in its first full summer season. About 20 members of Country Club of North Carolina have marked it with a 4.8m black walnut boardroom table made by a Dornoch woodworker.
Royal Dornoch Golf Club, in Dornoch in the Scottish Highlands of Sutherland, Scotland, has reached its first full summer season with a new £13.9 million clubhouse by Keppie Design, a three-story building of 2,160 square meters (about 23,250 square feet). Partial opening to members came in December 2025. On 15 October the club announced that about 20 members of Country Club of North Carolina had privately funded a boardroom table for the Donald Ross Room, as reported on the club’s news page.
Treecraft Woodwork of Station Square in Dornoch, founded in 1983, produced the table. It measures 4.8 meters by 1.8 meters in American Black Walnut, with a solid top and routed steel stabilizer bars. The Highland Tiger coat of arms, inlaid in African ebony, Namibian rosewood, and maple rather than printed or painted, accounts for roughly 40 percent of the commission. Alvin Wood, the owner and a native of Brora, produced the coat of arms; George Farrell served as lead craftsman. The firm has not previously been asked to design a larger boardroom table.
Named for Donald Ross, the golf course architect born in Dornoch, the room received the gift after a conversation that involved past captain Gary Bethune, who described himself as “blown away” by the result. Ralph Ronalter, CCNC team captain and a Royal Dornoch member for a decade, noted that a Scot, Dick Urquhart, founded the North Carolina club in the 1960s. That connection appears in the CCNC lake, the main driveway, and the clubhouse grillroom names, as well as in the biennial matches the two clubs play.
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Keppie, the Glasgow practice appointed after an international design competition, lists on its project page a pro shop, changing facilities, exhibition spaces, restaurants, lounges, and flexible hospitality space overlooking the Championship Course, the Dornoch Firth, and the town. Themes of heritage and of concealing and revealing views shape the design. Lead architect Fraser Davie told The National the aim was a building authentically “Of Dornoch.” The same report notes that the building replaces the club’s second clubhouse, which had served for more than a century.
COVID-19 paused the project for almost 18 months; construction inflation followed, though Keppie says the design stayed largely intact. A ground source heat pump, battery storage, and a whole-roof photovoltaic array color-matched to slate serve the building, which carries an EPC A rating and a stated 8.02 kgCO2/m2/year. No main contractor has been named in the published material. Among British clubs with distinctive clubhouses are Woodhall Spa National Golf Centre, where a £9M G1 clubhouse stands in Lincolnshire, England, and Felixstowe Ferry Golf Club, whose living-roof clubhouse sits in Suffolk, England.
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Club management reported in August that pints poured in May rose from 2,000 in 2025 to 8,000 in 2026, while kegs went from 25 to 74. Plates served doubled in the same period, and the food and beverage team added six staff, all local. Opening day in December drew about 600 people; at the Captain’s Invitational dinner the old clubhouse held 86 while the new one seated 186. The project is shortlisted for the RICS Awards 2026 Scotland (Commercial) and the AJ Architecture Awards 2026 (Leisure), and it is nominated for the Scottish Design Awards 2026. Keppie also cites Royal Dornoch’s Golf Digest ranking as world No. 2 and notes that The R&A selected the club for the 2028 Curtis Cup.
A club dating to 1877 that draws golfers to the far north of Scotland now pairs its new building with a boardroom table built by a Dornoch firm and funded by members from across the Atlantic. The clubhouse that seated 186 at one dinner holds that table.
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