Barrington Hills Country Club

A storied private club founded in 1921, nestled among 220 acres of rolling wooded land 40 miles northwest of Chicago. The course has been refined over the decades by William Langford and Tom Doak.

Barrington Hills Country Club celebrated its centennial in 2021, one hundred years after a group of Chicago-area industrialists and sportsmen gathered to create a genuine "club in the country" on the rolling farmland northwest of Chicago. The club's founding story, its handsome 1931 clubhouse, and its golf course shaped by multiple generations of distinguished architects all speak to an institution that has remained deeply connected to its original vision of pastoral retreat from the city. The organizing energy behind the club came from Harry Stilson Hart, a prominent Chicago industrialist who owned a farmstead known as Hart Hills just east of the proposed site. In 1921, Hart enlisted two neighboring landowners — George E. Van Hagen of Wakefield Farm and J.R. Cardwell of Oak Knoll Farm — to donate land for the enterprise. Together, the three parcels contributed roughly 200 acres of unfarmable land between County Line Road, Oak Knoll Road, and Northwest Highway, terrain that had been bypassed by agriculture because of its uneven, glacially shaped character — precisely the qualities that made it attractive for golf. Van Hagen became the club's first president. The original golf course was laid out in 1921 by George O'Neil, an architect active in the Chicago region during the early years of the game. O'Neil worked with the rolling terrain, using its natural contours to establish a routing that would later be refined and significantly redesigned over the following decades.

In 1946, William Langford — who alongside his partner Theodore Moreau was the preeminent golf architect of the Chicago region for a generation — undertook a substantial revision of the layout. Langford had authored influential essays on golf course design as early as 1915, articulating a philosophy that the course should adhere as closely as possible to the natural features of the land, with artificial hazards secondary to natural ones. That philosophy expressed itself clearly in his work at Barrington Hills. The original clubhouse, designed by noted Chicago architect Robert Work in association with David Adler, opened in 1926 but burned to the ground in 1930. Work designed a replacement, which opened in 1931 and still stands today — a handsome building that became the social center of the club during its formative decades.

In 1964, Larry Packard, among the prolific architects working in the Midwest, made further modifications to the course. The most recent significant revision came in 2005 when Tom Doak undertook a comprehensive redesign of several holes, bringing a more strategic and naturalistic sensibility to portions of the layout while respecting the character Langford had established. The resulting course reflects the cumulative wisdom of five architects across a century, a palimpsest of design decisions made in response to the same fundamental landform: the rolling hills, oak groves, and stream corridors of the Barrington countryside. Today Barrington Hills Country Club occupies approximately 200 acres and offers its membership an 18-hole layout that has matured into among the scenically engaging courses in the Chicago suburbs. The club's centennial marked a milestone for an institution that has consistently served as a gathering place for the Barrington Hills community while maintaining the golfing traditions that animated its founding generation.