Belleair Country Club: West Course

Belleair Country Club is a Donald Ross design on Florida's Gulf Coast near Clearwater, featuring two 18-hole courses built on the grounds of the historic Belleview Biltmore Hotel. Its rolling terrain is remarkably un-Florida-like.

Belleair Country Club holds a distinction that no other golf institution in Florida can claim: it is the oldest golf club in the state, with a history stretching back to 1897. The West Golf Course was originally laid out that year by order of railway and steamboat magnate Henry Bradley Plant, who had just opened the enormous Belleview Hotel — one of the largest wooden structures in the world — on the high ground above Clearwater Bay. Plant wanted a golf course to complement the hotel's amenities, and six holes with crushed-shell greens were built beside the hotel's grounds. When Plant died in 1899, his son Morton took over the property, expanded the course to nine holes, and initiated a series of experiments with grass varieties and soil treatments that produced what are believed to be the first grass greens in the American South. By 1909 the course had grown to eighteen holes, giving the Belleview's guests a full-length layout. Donald Ross first visited the property in 1915, recognizing immediately the appeal of the Clearwater Bay topography — the West Course sits on land with roughly thirty feet of elevation change, an extraordinary feature for Florida, set beside half a mile of frontage along the bay.

In 1915, Ross redesigned the West Course and added an East Course on land inland of the older layout, creating a two-course complex that transformed Belleair from a hotel amenity into a genuine golf destination. Less than a decade later, in 1924, Ross returned and revised both courses further, incorporating lessons from his prolific mid-career years designing across the American South. The 1924 West Course drawings became the foundational document for the club's future and the basis for the 2022 restoration. The West Course — which Ross called the Number One Course — passed through the twentieth century largely intact in its routing but subject to the familiar accumulations of change: greens shrunk through overgrowth, bunker profiles softened, ravines and streams filled in, and fairways narrowed by encroaching tree lines. In 2020, the club hired Fry/Straka Global Golf Course Design, led by partners Dana Fry and Jason Straka, to conduct a comprehensive restoration. The $8.8 million project required extensive archival research.

Jason Straka consulted historical records stored at the Tufts Archives at Pinehurst Resort and at the Belleview Inn on the property, working from both the 1915 and 1924 Ross construction drawings to produce modern construction documents that honored the original design intent. Construction broke ground in March 2022 and the restored West Course reopened in November 2022. All eighteen greens were rebuilt to USGA specifications and then reshaped to follow Ross's 1924 contour drawings. Fairways were expanded by fifty percent to their originally intended width, restoring the angles from which Ross designed his approaches. Ravines and streams that had been filled in over previous decades were re-exposed, returning the natural drainage character of the property. The restoration won the Sports Illustrated award for Best Golden Age East Coast Private Course Renovation in 2022 and was named runner-up for Golf Digest's Best Transformation in 2023.

The East Course, a companion Ross design from the same 1915–1924 period, continues to operate as a second eighteen for the membership. Together the two courses give Belleair a dual-layout golf program rooted in Donald Ross's Florida work that is unmatched for historical depth anywhere in the state. Belleair Country Club today operates as a private residential club anchored by two Donald Ross courses on some of the most topographically varied ground in Florida. The West Course restoration returned the layout to what many historians consider its finest form since the 1920s, re-establishing a design that in its original incarnation was among the thoughtful and carefully planned courses Ross produced anywhere in the American Southeast.