Grand Harbor Golf & Beach Club can claim one of the greatest comebacks ever seen in Vero Beach – and it just keeps getting better, with the exciting announcement of $36 million in new improvements.

The latest round of upgrades will include a complete renovation of the main clubhouse, along with construction of a stand-alone lifestyle and wellness center called The Cove, which takes the club’s architecture in a cool new direction, while adding fitness space overlooking the Indian River Lagoon, Pilates studios, spa rooms, a café and bar, a resort-style swimming pool – and even a Zen garden.

When members wrested control of their future from the club’s previous owner five years ago after a bitter struggle, the club was nearly broke, in disrepair and bleeding members.

Sixty or so members who paid their dues five years in advance and a $6-million bridge loan from South State Bank kept the club afloat and gave the first independent board time to make a master plan to restore Grand Harbor to its highest self.

What’s happened since then has been so amazing that club leaders have taken to calling it “our magic carpet ride,” in the words of General Manager Michael Gibson

In a virtuous cycle that continues today, the first board hired decorated club manager Gibson, consulted with members about their most pressing wants and needs, and began pouring what money they had into repairs and improvements.

Fresh paint, new energy and noticeable upgrades began to attract new members, including from outside the garden-like 900-acre, 1,180-home country club community. New members brought new money that funded additional improvements, which in turn attracted more new members and began to create a positive buzz around town.

Membership has doubled since the dark days in early 2021, from 586 to 1,120, according to Gibson. Both 18-hole championship golf courses have been thoroughly renovated, and the golf practice facility is being redone. There are eight new pickleball courts and an upgraded tennis program. The beach club has been beautifully rehabbed and reconfigured, with new dining space and expanded parking, and restrooms throughout the club have been remodeled.

Now, members have approved another $36-million worth of new and improved amenities.

“We’re thrilled that 77 percent voted in favor of these improvements,” says Gibson. “Our members really want this.”

Besides conducting formal surveys of member wishes, Gibson, board members and other leaders stay finely attuned with member thinking on a daily basis, using a program called ClubIQ.

The program continuously surveys the entire membership, polling about 10 people a day on a rotating basis, asking pertinent questions about what is right and wrong with the club and what new features members are hoping for.

“I read the responses every morning while I am having breakfast,” says club president Tim Cutler.

Plans for renovating the 40-year-old main clubhouse were drawn up by Palm Beach architects Peacock + Lewis, club architecture specialists who are well known in Vero Beach.

The renovation will include redesigning the clubhouse lobby, removing a central interior staircase that eats up a lot of space, and doubling the size of the card room to seat 100 players. There will be a new grab-and-go café and marketplace, renovated locker rooms and an enlarged golf shop.

The centerpiece of the redesign is a two-story 6,000-square-foot addition that will add 3,000 square feet of interior and patio dining space on the main level along with a 3,000-square-foot indoor/outdoor bar on the ground floor.

The club’s current bar is a small space in the formal dining room that Cutler says “just doesn’t work for us, especially at dinnertime.”

The club is getting younger, according to Gibson, with the average age of members dropping from 79 in 2021 to 72 today. And new members are 10 years younger than that, on average.

“The younger members really wanted a real bar,” Gibson says.

Both the upstairs dining space and downstairs sports bar will look out at a long water view that takes in the ninth hole of River Course. The bar is enclosed with walls of glass that can be folded back during nice weather.

“It is as pretty a view as you can find in Grand Harbor,” says Director of Marketing Kathryn Redner-Funnell

The design was inspired by a similar setup at Orchid Island Golf & Beach Club, according to Gibson. That club recently expanded the dining space at its golf clubhouse and opened it up to take in a gorgeous lake view.

“Our members went there and saw that and said, ‘that is what we want!’” Gibson says.

The Cove Lifestyle + Fitness Center is an even more dramatic statement than the clubhouse addition. Designed by Leo A. Daly, a 110-year-old architecture and engineering firm that “focuses on buildings that connect communities and enable a rich diversity of experience,” the sleek and exciting building will occupy the space now occupied by Grand Harbor’s old, underused swimming pool, east of the clubhouse.

The curved white-panel and glass façade of the 15,000-square-foot structure departs from the community’s traditional Mediterranean Revival architecture in all the best ways, echoing the style of new residences being built in the community by GHO Homes and others. The new homes are distinctly more contemporary than Grand Harbor’s legacy houses and condos and reflect the club’s new, younger demographic.

The building will contain 5,000 square feet of exercise space with wide views of the Indian River Lagoon, spa and treatment rooms, Pilates studios, a café and outdoor gazebo bar, outdoor yoga lawns, a Zen garden and a fabulous new resort-style swimming pool with lap lanes, sun shelf and hot tub.

Gibson says Grand Harbor’s renovated beach club, which now incorporates a high-end seafood restaurant, “has been crazy successful,” shifting recreation and dining patterns among its growing membership.

“We expect the Cove to take some of the pressure off the beach club,” Gibson says.

Work got underway this week on a third element of the current round of upgrades.

“We are just starting work on our 13-acre golf practice facility,” says Gibson. “That is a $2.5-million project that members approved last year.” It will include a café, new restrooms, and the latest training and rehab technology.

Gibson expects the new practice facility to be complete by October, about the time construction of The Cove is scheduled to start.

“We are about a month away from having final construction drawings for the lifestyle and wellness center,” he said. “After that we will go in for permits and hope to break ground by Oct. 1.”

The Cove is slated to be a 12-to-13-month project, which means it should be open and active by the 2027-28 winter season.

Gibson expects to start construction at the clubhouse in May 2027 and finish up by early summer 2028.

By the time the clubhouse is complete, Grand Harbor will have sunk $65 million into improvements and additions over a seven-year period to fuel its “magic carpet ride.”

There was an element of luck in the club’s amazing success over the past five years. Members took over the club and launched the original master plan just as Covid-19 spurred the great “Pandemic Migration,” in which millions of people moved out of big cities, heading for smaller towns with more outdoor recreational opportunities.

That migration and desire for open-air activities sparked a nationwide country club and golf renaissance. Here in Vero, clubs have spent or budgeted $150 million or more for improvements since 2020, even as membership rolls have filled to overflowing, creating long waiting lists at many clubs.

So, Grand Harbor was fortunate to catch that wave. But it has also benefited from an impressive amount of determination and talent among members and staff.

Gibson brought decades of club management experience, including overseeing numerous renovation projects, when he was recruited to lead the turnaround.

“This is my sixth clubhouse renovation, and I’ve done eight golf course renovations,” Gibson says.

“He is our Aladdin,” says Redner-Funnell.

Cutler led three company turnarounds as an executive in the industrial coatings industry, and the chairman of the master plan committee, Simon Caldecott, has 47 years of high-level experience in the aviation industry, including 10 years as CEO of Piper Aircraft.

“I'm an aeronautical engineer, but moved into manufacturing and then into business, running programs and factories. I ran a lot of factories at one time and did a lot of strategic planning,” says Caldecott, who plans to continue leading the master plan committee until the current renovations are complete.

But it was grit as well as talent that got the club back on track, as illustrated by a story Cutler tells about the club’s toughest period.

During the early days of the pandemic, he and some golf friends showed up to play and found that the previous owner, then still in charge, had closed the course.

“We decided that wasn’t going to stop us,” Cutler says. “So we all went out and we got hand carts and kept playing. The next day, they pulled the flag. And then the next week, they filled every hole with sand.

“I mean, those were the tactics employed by that group – they actually plugged the holes!”

In response, Cutler and friends, including Mike Spence, improvised their own holes and kept playing.

“It is hard to believe how much the club has changed since then,” Cutler says.

Grand Harbor’s winged trajectory is all but certain to continue as the new amenities come online in the next couple of years.

Gibson says the club is getting close to full membership, which will top out at around 1,200.

“After that we will have between 25 and 40 new members annually due to turnover and attrition,” he says.

The club plans to raise its full golf membership from $75,000 to $100,000 this fall, bumping social membership up from $45,000 to $65,000, so that trickle of new members will mean millions of dollars in new money each year that can be used for continued refinement of the Grand Harbor experience.