Why PGA National Picked Its Farthest Course To Go Private

If you carry a PGA National Golf Club membership, you already know the one course that breaks the pattern. Four of your courses sit inside the gates, close enough that plenty of members walk or golf-cart over from home. The fifth one requires an actual drive. The Estates Course sits about five miles away in Bay Hill Estates, on a separate piece of land that has never quite felt like part of the neighborhood the other four courses share.

That geographic quirk just became the reason this particular course is about to change more than any other piece of the club.

On September 16, 2026, PGA National Resort announced that the Estates Course is closing for a full rebuild and reopening as Triple Stick Golf Club, a members-only, non-equity enclave designed by Love Golf Design, the firm led by World Golf Hall of Famer Davis Love III. A new clubhouse from Peacock + Lewis follows in 2028. If you golf here, or you own a home here and have wondered what your membership dues actually buy you, this is worth understanding in more than headline form.

What Got Announced, In Plain Terms

The new course keeps the Estates Course's existing routing, lakes and landform, but rebuilds nearly everything else around a Pete and Alice Dye influence: railroad-tie bulkheads, flat-bottomed bunkers, wide playing corridors and native waste areas instead of manicured rough. Lead architect Scot Sherman worked alongside the Dyes for years, including on The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, and more recently reworked Delray Dunes Golf & Country Club in nearby Boynton Beach using the same design language.

A few specifics worth knowing if you're a member weighing whether to add this to your existing club access:

1. The rebuilt course is an 18-hole, par-70 layout, with both nines closing on a par 5, scheduled to open in late fall 2026.
2. The clubhouse, an 11,000-square-foot building with a dining-forward layout and covered outdoor seating, is anticipated in 2028.
3. Membership is structured as private and non-equity, with spouse or partner and children under 23 included.

Rob Duckett, managing director of golf and club operations at Henderson Park, framed the project as an upgrade over what the Estates Course offered before, calling it a chance to build something that feels intimate and carefully designed for members who join.

The Geography That Made This Possible

Here is the part that explains why this course, and not one of the other four, is the one becoming something separate. PGA National's golf membership has always included five courses, and four of them sit inside the gated community: the Champion Course, home to the Bear Trap and the PGA Tour's Cognizant Classic; the Palmer Course; the Squire, named for Gene Sarazen; and the newly renovated Fazio Course, a redo of the original Haig layout from 1980. Those four are woven into daily life at PGA National. They border the neighborhoods where members actually live.

The Estates Course was always the outlier, five miles away in a different community, designed separately by Karl Litten. It was part of the membership package, but it was never part of the walk-to-the-clubhouse experience the other four courses offer. That separation is exactly what made it possible to pull the Estates Course out of the shared membership pool and turn it into something with its own gate, its own fee structure and its own limited roster, without touching the four courses that define everyday club life inside PGA National proper.

If you golf the Champion or the Palmer on a typical Saturday, nothing about your course access changes. The course that's disappearing from the standard membership was already the one you had to plan a drive for.

Membership Here Was Never Mandatory, and This Doesn't Change That

Owning inside PGA National has never come with a requirement to join the club. As Michael Gozzo, broker and owner of GulfStream Properties, has put it, residents move here for the chance to play golf or tennis, but membership itself is optional. That structure matters for reading this announcement correctly. Triple Stick isn't a new mandatory cost layered onto every homeowner in the community. It's a new optional product, sitting on top of an already-optional membership system, aimed at members who specifically want the Estates location and are willing to pay for a smaller, more exclusive version of it.

Current PGA National Resort members get what the club is calling first look access, meaning the option to add Triple Stick to an existing membership before it opens more broadly. Early membership promotions are available now, ahead of the late fall 2026 opening. None of this touches base dues for members who have no interest in the new club, and it has zero bearing on homeowners in the roughly 40 named neighborhoods here who never carried a golf membership at all.

This Fits a Pattern That Started Last Year

Triple Stick isn't an isolated golf project. PGA National Resort, all 807 acres of it, was purchased in 2025 by Henderson Park, an international real estate investment firm, in partnership with South Street Partners and Salamander Collection, the hospitality company founded by Sheila Johnson that also manages the resort day to day. That ownership group inherited a property that had already completed a $100 million renovation under the previous owner, and rather than sit on that investment, they've kept building.

The same ownership era brought in The Butcher's Club, a steakhouse from "Top Chef" winner Jeremy Ford, and Honeybelle, a seasonal American restaurant led by chef and Palm Beach resident Lindsay Autry, both of which opened as part of the resort's dining lineup before this golf announcement. Triple Stick follows that same instinct: take an existing asset, in this case a golf course that already sat apart from the rest of the property, and turn it into something more specific and more curated rather than just another renovation of the same product.

If you've lived here through the last renovation cycle, the pattern should feel familiar. New ownership groups tend to look for the piece of the property that already stands apart and use it to launch something distinct, rather than retrofitting the parts everyone already uses every day.

What to Actually Ask Before You Decide Anything

If you're a current member weighing whether Triple Stick is worth adding to your access, a few questions are worth getting straight answers to before the early promotion window closes:

• What is the actual add-on cost for current Resort members versus the cost of joining Triple Stick as a standalone membership later.
• Whether the "first look" period has a hard deadline or is open-ended.
• What happens to guest privileges at the new clubhouse compared to the existing dining venues at Honeybelle and The Butcher's Club.
• Whether the intentionally limited membership cap has a published number, or whether it's being managed informally as interest grows.

None of these questions require you to make a decision quickly. The course itself won't open until late fall 2026, and the clubhouse isn't expected until 2028. There's time to watch how the membership terms firm up before committing either way.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own address here, whether you carry a club membership or never have, GulfStream Properties knows this community from the inside. Reach out any time you want a straight read on how a change like this fits into the bigger picture of owning here.