If you live near Sawgrass Country Club, you've probably heard some version of the same rumor twice this year: the golf course is closing, the Beach Club is next, and it all started back in November. None of that quite lines up with what's actually on the record.
Here's the real sequence. The club's membership voted to approve a $55 million capital improvements plan on October 22, 2025. The club said construction would begin the following month. Then, on August 4, 2026, nearly nine months after that promise, Sawgrass Country Club filed its commercial plan review application with St. Johns County. That's the actual first regulatory step toward breaking ground, and it happened this month, not last fall. If your Saturday tee time still feels normal, that's because the visible part of this project hasn't started yet.
What the club approved last October
The plan itself is substantial. It covers a full renovation of all 27 holes across the East, West, and South courses, led by golf course architects Dana Fry and Jason Straka. It also funds a 7,347-square-foot expansion of the fitness center, an update to the Beach Club Pavilion and its dining areas, and a refreshed Tennis Pavilion with 13 new tennis courts.
In a Facebook post announcing the membership vote, club management called it "an exciting new chapter" for the club. That's understandable framing for a five-decade-old institution. Sawgrass Country Club opened in 1974 and hosted the PGA Tour's Tournament Players Championship from 1977 through 1981, before the event moved next door to TPC Sawgrass in 1982. The club has never been shy about reinvesting in itself since. This new plan follows a $20 million clubhouse renovation completed in 2021, built by Auld & White Constructors of Jacksonville with Peacock + Lewis as architect.
What the club didn't do, at least not yet, is start moving dirt.
What a permit filing actually tells you
A lot of people assume "construction begins" means the same thing as "the county has signed off." It doesn't. The application filed on August 4 with St. Johns County lays out the technical scope: improvements to all holes, the practice area and driving range, and a future 3,750-square-foot performance center. It also covers golf cart bridges, revised cart paths, added cart parking, stormwater management modifications, and utility work tied to the new performance center. According to the filing, only 2 of the club's 265 acres are currently being engineered.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. Two acres out of 265 is not a project that has enveloped the property. It's a project that is still in the design and permitting phase, working through county review before any large-scale work can legally start. You can read the filing coverage from the Jax Daily Record if you want to see how the timeline compares to the club's original October announcement.
Here's the sequence laid out plainly:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| October 22, 2025 | Membership approves $55 million capital improvements plan |
| November 2025 (announced) | Construction expected to begin |
| December 1, 2025 | Joining fee increases from $85,000 to $125,000 |
| August 4, 2026 | Commercial plan review application filed with St. Johns County |
Nothing in the public record shows that gap being explained. It's possible the design phase simply took longer than the club anticipated when it made the November announcement. It's also a familiar pattern for large private club renovations, where the press release comes well before the permits do.
The club has done this before, in phases
If you're bracing for the entire golf operation to shut down at once, the club's own history suggests otherwise. When Sawgrass renovated its three nines between 2013 and 2015 under architect Robert Walker, a protégé of original designer Ed Seay, the work moved course by course. The East and West nines were finished first, with the South nine completed in the fall of 2015. Members kept playing the other two rotations while each section was under construction. You can see the club's own account of that project on its golf course history page.
The Beach Club followed a similar pattern in its last major renovation. The indoor dining and bar areas closed for the work, but the outdoor decks and the SandBar Pavilion stayed open through the fall before the full project wrapped in April 2016. And when the club built its current clubhouse, Peacock + Lewis designed it to open in phases, with the lower level available to members before the main level was finished, so the property never went fully dark during construction.
None of that guarantees the golf course overhaul will play out the same way this time. But it's a reasonable baseline. A club with three separate multi-million dollar projects behind it in the last fifteen years has a track record of keeping some part of the operation running while it rebuilds another.
What to actually watch for
Right now, day-to-day life at the club looks the way it always has. The three nine-hole rotations, East, West, and South, are still in play. The Beach Club's usual venues, the Topsider Lounge, Jay's Bar, and the SandBar Bistro at the Pavilion, are operating normally. Tennis is still played on the existing Har-Tru courts. Day-to-day club operations are overseen by general manager Stefan Brunt and director of golf Nate Marozzi.
The things that would actually signal construction is underway haven't shown up yet, based on everything publicly reported:
- Fencing or staging around specific holes on any of the three nines
- Cart path detours or closures tied to the bridge and drainage work described in the county filing
- A public start date from the club itself, now that permitting is finally moving
- County approval of the plan review application, which is the next procedural step after filing
Membership demand hasn't slowed down while all this works through the county process. The club's joining fee rose from $85,000 to $125,000 effective December 1, 2025, and the waitlist has held around six to nine months. That tells you the appeal of the club hasn't dimmed just because the renovation is taking longer to formally launch than the original announcement suggested.
If you want a dinner option nearby while any of this eventually shifts around the clubhouse, Argyle sits inside Sawgrass at 254 Alta Mar Drive and is open to the public, with chef Jon Blackford running a seasonal, scratch-made menu. It's a reasonable fallback for a Friday night whenever the Beach Club dining rooms are mid-project.
For now, the honest answer to "when does the Sawgrass renovation start" is that the paperwork just caught up to the plan. The next real signal will be county approval of that plan review, not another press release repeating last October's news.
If you're a Sawgrass Country Club neighbor thinking about what a renovation like this actually means for property values, resale timing, or how buyers read construction disruption in due diligence, that's the kind of question worth a real conversation rather than a guess. Laura Worrell has spent her career reading construction timelines and permit filings for clients across Ponte Vedra Beach, and she's happy to walk through what this project could mean for your specific address once the county's next update lands.
