Walk from the clubhouse toward the old practice green this fall and you'll notice the grass is gone from where it used to be. Not gone as in dead. Gone as in replaced by something that has almost nothing to do with your golf swing.
That patch of turf next to the clubhouse used to be where members hit fifty balls before a round. Now it's a 28,000-square-foot putting lawn called The Ridge, built with the kind of rolling, tiered contours you'd find on a Himalayas-style course, lit for play after sunset, wired for music, and anchored by an outdoor bar. If you left Desert Highlands for the summer and came back for the fall social calendar, this is the first thing you'll clock. The second thing, once you notice it, is that it isn't an isolated choice. It's a pattern.
The Course Reopened. That Part Everyone Expected.
The headline renovation was never in question. Desert Highlands closed its Jack Nicklaus Signature Course in late April 2025 and kept it shut for roughly seven months, reopening for play in November. The project ran just under $10 million and touched almost every playing surface on the course: greens were rebuilt and expanded by about 26 percent and converted from Bermuda back to Bentgrass, bunkers were reshaped, tee boxes were lowered across most holes except the 13th, and years of overgrown desert vegetation came out to restore sightlines that had disappeared over four decades.
The most interesting single change wasn't cosmetic. On the short par-4 13th, Nicklaus Design senior designer Chad Goetz and the team eliminated a ridge that had been blocking golfers' view of the hole's alternate fairway, turning it into a longer, riskier, more drivable hole. It's the kind of detail only someone who's played the course a hundred times would register on the first round back.
The result got outside validation this past July, when Golf Inc. Magazine named the project first place in the private club category of its 2026 Best Renovation of the Year awards, ahead of Mira Vista Country Club in Texas, the Landings Golf and Athletic Club in Georgia, and Stones River Country Club in Tennessee, which took honorable mention. General manager Desi Speh called it the culmination of years of work from members and staff.
"We are thrilled at the end result of this extensive golf course restoration project."
That's the part of the story every golf publication in the country already covered. It's not the part that changes how you'll actually spend a Tuesday evening at the club.
The Money That Didn't Go Toward Par
Here's what the Golf Inc. write-up made clear that the golf press mostly skipped past: the same $9.8 million restoration didn't just fix fairways. It also built The Ridge on the site of the old practice green, and its purpose is stated plainly by the people who designed it. It's lit at night. It has speakers built in. It has a bar. Nothing about that combination is designed to lower anyone's handicap. It's designed to give members somewhere to end up after dinner that isn't the same lounge chair they sat in last spring.
Ventana, the club's dining room, got a quieter version of the same treatment. The renovation added large windows and opened up the floor plan specifically to let more of the Pinnacle Peak views into the dining experience. Again, not a performance upgrade. A socializing one.
Put those two projects next to each other and a pattern starts to look less like coincidence and more like a decision. When Desert Highlands had close to $10 million to spend on infrastructure that supports golf, a meaningful slice of it went toward infrastructure that supports standing around after golf.
The Locker Rooms Got the Same Treatment
If The Ridge and Ventana were the first signal, the locker room work confirms it.
The women's locker room and golf shop got a separate $2.5 million overhaul finished over that same seven-month stretch. The new pro shop has an expanded entrance and a relocated retail counter, standard stuff for a retail refresh. The locker room upgrade is where the intent shows: brighter finishes, a refreshed card lounge, and a new self-serve station stocked with snack drawers, grab-and-go lunch options, wine on tap, and a Pour-My-Beer system. That's not changing-room language. That's lounge language.
Now the men's locker room is getting the same logic applied, and it's still in progress as of this fall. Construction began in June 2026, led by PHX Architecture and Hatch Design Group, the same pair behind the women's locker room, the pro shop, and the original Jack's gastropub. The project is slated to wrap by the end of 2026, and the club has been explicit about what's coming:
- The men's grille and lounge reimagined as a more open, inviting gathering space
- A new fireside lounge called the Nicklaus Room, built as "a refined setting for conversation and relaxation" rather than a place to store clubs
- Elevated finishes and improved lighting throughout the locker area itself
- Fully modernized wet areas, showers, vanities, and restrooms
- A stronger physical connection between the indoor lounge space and the outdoor patio and course views
Read that list again. Exactly one item, the wet areas, is about the locker room doing its actual job. Everything else is about turning a functional space into a place members want to linger.
The Renovation Cycle, Mapped
| Phase | Timing | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Golf course restoration | Closed late April 2025, reopened November 2025 | Greens, bunkers, tees, turf, desert re-vegetation, hole redesigns |
| The Ridge putting lawn | Completed alongside the course project | 28,000 sq ft, lit at night, outdoor bar, built-in speakers |
| Women's locker room and golf shop | Completed by November 2025 | New retail layout, lounge-style comfort station |
| Ventana dining room | Completed alongside the course project | Larger windows, open floor plan |
| Men's locker room | Began June 2026, targeted for completion by year-end 2026 | New Nicklaus Room lounge, modernized wet areas, indoor-outdoor connection |
Laid out this way, the sequence stops looking like a series of separate announcements and starts looking like one long project with a consistent thesis: performance infrastructure and social infrastructure got renovated on the same timeline and, in the case of The Ridge and Ventana, with the same dollars.
What This Means for Your Fall
The golf course has been open and playing to its restored specifications for about ten months now, so that part of the transition is behind you. The Ridge is the newer habit to build. If your evenings at the club still default to the same table at Jack's or the same corner of Jack's Backyard by the fireside seating and bocce courts, it's worth walking the extra hundred feet to the putting lawn after dark this season. It was built for exactly that walk.
The men's locker room is the one piece of this cycle that's still mid-transition. Male members should expect some construction disruption through the rest of the year as the Nicklaus Room and the rest of the renovation come together, with the club targeting a finish before 2026 closes out. Everything else, the Racquet Club's thirteen courts across grass, clay, and hard surfaces, the pickleball courts, the dog park by the pond, carries on unaffected.
What none of this changes is the thing that was already true about Desert Highlands: it's a small, exclusive membership tied directly to the real estate, tucked against Pinnacle Peak, and its calendar runs on club rhythms as much as anything happening in greater Scottsdale. This year, that rhythm just got a new stop on the evening route. If you're heading to the club after dinner this month, that's where you'll probably end up.
If you're curious how a renovation cycle like this tends to show up in what buyers and sellers are watching in North Scottsdale golf communities, the Torie Ellens Team tracks that alongside the neighborhood itself. Reach out and schedule your concierge consultation whenever the conversation turns from the putting lawn to the real estate around it.
