Sara Bay Country Club in Sarasota and Manatee County, Florida, Starts a Nearly $9.6 Million Clubhouse Renovation as Its Donald Ross Course Turns 100
Sara Bay Country Club in the Sarasota and Manatee County area of Florida has begun a nearly $9.6 million clubhouse renovation. CMSA designed it; KSD Clubhouse Interiors and JE Charlotte Construction are on the job.
Sara Bay Country Club, a member-owned private golf club in the Sarasota and Manatee County area of Florida, has started a clubhouse renovation valued at nearly $9.6 million, a figure Business Observer reporter Elizabeth King published on March 25, 2026. The work lands with the centennial of the club's Donald Ross course, which opened in 1926, and is expected to finish in early 2027.
The firms on the job are largely local. CMSA, a Sarasota architecture practice known for waterfront houses and golf clubs, is the architect. KSD Clubhouse Interiors, also based in Sarasota, is handling the interior design. JE Charlotte Construction, a southwest Florida construction manager with more than 30 years in commercial building, is the general contractor. The club announced the start of construction in March, as carried by The Golf Wire and First Call Golf.
The decision to leave the outside alone is as clear as the decision to reopen the rooms. Sara Bay is keeping the exterior of its 1920s Spanish Renaissance clubhouse, buff stucco walls, red-tile roof, wide palm-fringed terraces, and broad French doors included. The building stands on a pine-topped knoll that Ross chose himself, set so the house would look over both the first tee and the final green. A hundred years on, that placement still does the basic job of a clubhouse, framing the start and the close of every round.
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Inside, the plan follows how members actually use the building. The existing dining room and bar will be joined into one central gathering space, and the grill room and its bar are being recast as a more finished setting for the hour after a round. Outdoor dining and open-air areas will grow, the locker rooms and boardroom are being refreshed, and a new multi-use room will serve both dining and cards. Just off the main entrance, a history hall lined with display cases will hold artifacts and memorabilia from the club's first hundred years.
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General manager John Spiess said the scope came from the membership, with the Board of Directors surveying members to set priorities. He called the project "intentional and on trend with what today's private club members want most," and set the aim as making Sara Bay a still more inviting second home for the people who belong to it. Board president Perry Pogany tied the spending to a longer horizon, calling the renovation a reflection of member support and a way to hold the club's legacy for the generations that follow.
The building work follows a recent course renovation, overseen by architect Kris Spence, that restored the greens, green surrounds, and angles of play Ross originally designed. The history hall, for its part, gives a permanent room to a record that begins with Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones meeting at Sara Bay in 1926.
Clubs facing the same question of how to update a historic house have answered it differently, from the coastal remake at King & Prince on St. Simons Island to the clubhouse commitment at Oldfield. Sara Bay's answer is restraint on the outside and a fuller program inside.
Published accounts do not include a square-footage total, a room-by-room budget, or a month inside early 2027. The part of Sara Bay that no budget could rebuild is the house Ross set above his opening tee and closing green, and the club has left that shell in place. By putting nearly $9.6 million into the rooms within, guided by what its own members asked for, Sara Bay is betting that a club entering its second century does better by making its oldest asset work than by replacing it.
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