The Country Club (Brookline)
The Country Club's primrose yellow clubhouse in Brookline started as an 1860 farmhouse. Today it is three stories of Colonial Revival clapboard behind the 18th green, still holding a room from the original structure and a copy of the USGA charter signed in 1894.
The first golf country club in America has a clubhouse that originally started as a farmhouse.
The Country Club's primrose yellow clubhouse in Brookline, Massachusetts, was built around an 1860 farmhouse on the Clyde Park estate. When a group of wealthy Boston men founded the club in 1882, they converted the existing structure into a social headquarters for horseback riding, steeplechase, and coaching. Golf didn't arrive for another decade. It is not the only iconic American clubhouse that started as a farmhouse. The building has been expanded and renovated many times since, but a room from the original farmhouse is still inside, and the yellow clapboard exterior has looked essentially the same since Francis Ouimet walked across Clyde Street and won the 1913 U.S. Open.
Best Clubhouse's Tour of The Country Club's Clubhouse
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Key Details
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- Club: The Country Club
- Location: Brookline, Massachusetts
- Clubhouse Architect: Unknown (1860 farmhouse, converted 1882); Mashek MacLean Architects (major renovation prior to the 1999 Ryder Cup)
- Year Built: c. 1860 (farmhouse); converted to clubhouse 1882
- Architectural Style: Colonial / Greek Revival
- Notable Features: Three-story yellow clapboard exterior painted in a shade called "primrose" for as long as anyone can remember; a room from the original 1860 farmhouse still intact inside the current structure; men's locker room displaying a copy of the 1894 USGA charter signed by the five founding clubs; horse stables still standing on the 236-acre campus; alongside Augusta National, one of the few major championship clubhouses that is literally a converted farmhouse; Francis Ouimet's childhood home at 246 Clyde Street sits directly across the road; the oldest golf-oriented country club in the United States and one of five charter members of the USGA; host of four U.S. Opens (1913, 1963, 1988, 2022) and the 1999 Ryder Cup
The clubhouse sits on a hillside behind the 18th green where, over 120 years ago, spectators watched horses gallop around a cinder racetrack. The polo fields are gone. The racetrack is a fairway. But the building is still here, still painted primrose, still the same yellow clapboard backdrop that television broadcasts have framed during four U.S. Opens and one of the most dramatic Ryder Cups ever played. Few buildings in American golf have seen more history. None were asked to see less of it coming.
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