Armchair Collective Acquires Tam O'Shanter in Brookville, Long Island, for Private Club Revival
The closed 148-acre North Shore course, once approved for 27 estate homes, is headed back toward golf after arsenic in the topsoil and a 2025 village code change reshaped the economics of the land.
Armchair Collective has acquired the closed 148-acre Tam O'Shanter golf property in Brookville, New York, on Long Island's North Shore in Nassau County. The buyer plans to renovate the course and reopen it as a members-only, for-profit private club. Word of the purchase arrived in a Village of Brookville update reported by LongIsland.com and Long Island Business on Sept. 30. The transaction steers the land away from a 27-home estate subdivision that had already received preliminary approval.
The update stood out for what it omitted. It disclosed no purchase price, renovation budget, schedule or reopening date. The village stated that any redevelopment remains subject to environmental, planning and regulatory review, and that officials will monitor the process. The announcement did not claim that the property's environmental concerns have been resolved.
Those concerns shaped much of the transaction. In 2019, two New Jersey-based entities, Titan Tam LLC and Segme Tam LLC, bought the property for $11.8 million, according to Nassau County property records cited by Newsday. The owner first indicated the site would remain a golf course. Newsday, citing state Department of Environmental Conservation documents, reported that it operated through the summer of 2021. After it closed, the owner filed an application for a residential subdivision permitted under existing zoning. According to the Long Island Press, the Planning Board granted preliminary approval in 2022 for 29 lots, including 27 single-family homes averaging five acres.
Arsenic found in the topsoil in 2022 stalled that plan. The Long Island Press reported that preparing the site for homes would have required removing about 135,000 cubic yards of soil and replacing it with clean topsoil. Mayor Daniel Serota told Newsday the work would have meant about 11,000 dump truck trips.
Golf does not require the same excavation. A DEC spokesman told Newsday the contamination was "a common amount for golf courses and apple orchards." He added that the property does not pose a significant threat to public health or the environment. Serota wrote that keeping it a golf course requires "significantly less and safer soil disturbance than a housing development."
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The village then rewrote its rules to make that outcome workable. Newsday reported that the amended code, passed unanimously in 2025, allows for-profit membership clubs. It also permits 10 members-only guest cottages and a new, smaller clubhouse on the site. Those are permissions, not plans. Armchair has not announced cottages or a clubhouse. "We incentivized it to stay a golf course," Serota told Newsday last November, when he also described the grounds as being in complete disrepair.
What remained of the old club has since been dispersed. In August, Newsday reported that the clubhouse's contents had been auctioned, with the auction house aiming to sell the space "to the bare walls." The same report said property records showed another sale in July.
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Armchair Collective's own pitch targets a particular kind of golfer. Its website says the group is built for the "Armchair Architect," golfers who see great design as the soul of the game. It describes a new national model for private golf that links architecturally exceptional courses. Access is by invitation, and nominations for limited memberships are set for release in fall 2026. The site names no courses.
Tam O'Shanter gives the group a different starting point from the usual routes into private golf. It is not an established club of the kind Heritage Golf Group pursued when it moved to buy Independence Golf Club near Richmond, Virginia. Nor is it a ground-up project like The Trail, a walking-only private club planned by Madison Capital's Ryan Hanks in Union County, North Carolina, with Gil Hanse designing the course. It is an existing course, closed since 2021, on land the village has amended its code to keep in golf.
For North Shore estate land, the more lasting point is how the decision was made. Acreage of this scale on Long Island is usually measured by the number of lots it can yield. In Brookville, the arithmetic ran the other way. The scale of cleanup that houses would have required, combined with a code written to favor golf, turned a stalled subdivision into a private club proposal. Armchair has not said what it will spend or when the course might reopen, and the review the village has promised still lies ahead. For now, 148 acres that were approved for houses are headed back toward golf.
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