Berkeley Country Club

Perched in the Berkeley Hills above the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Country Club offers sweeping panoramic views and a beautifully routed walking course. Co-designed by Robert Hunter of Cypress Point fame and Willie Watson of Olympic Club renown, the course blends strategic challenge with natural beauty.

Berkeley Country Club in El Cerrito, California, was founded in 1920 by a coalition of University of California faculty, alumni, and Bay Area civic and business leaders who sought to create a club whose intellectual and cultural character would reflect the university community it served. The founding membership included professors, administrators, and civic leaders who purchased a site in the Berkeley Hills with 360-degree panoramic views encompassing San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Tamalpais, and Wildcat Canyon — among the most commanding vistas available to any Bay Area golf course. For the golf course design, the club turned to two figures of considerable distinction: founding member Robert Hunter, who would go on to co-design Cypress Point with Alister MacKenzie in 1928, and William "Willie" Watson, the Scottish-born architect responsible for the Olympic Club layout and dozens of other California courses. Hunter's role as both founding member and co-designer gave the course an unusual intimacy with the club's founding vision — the routing reflects a golfer's knowledge of every knoll and slope rather than the more detached approach of an outside consultant working from surveys.

Watson's California experience and professional craft complemented Hunter's local knowledge, and together they produced a classic Golden Age layout routed superbly over natural terrain. The course opened in the early 1920s and was quickly regarded as a notable layout among Bay Area golf courses. In 1929, Berkeley Country Club hosted the Berkeley Open, won by Horton Smith — who would go on to win the inaugural Masters Tournament in 1934 and the 1936 Masters as well. The presence of Smith, then one of the rising stars of American golf, at a Berkeley Country Club event reflected the course's standing within the region's competitive golf hierarchy.

Smith shared the exhibition bill with two reigning major champions: Johnny Farrell, the 1928 U.S. Open champion, and Walter Hagen, the 1928 British Open champion — an alignment that marked Berkeley Country Club as a destination course worthy of the era's greatest players. The architectural firm of Walter Ratcliff Jr. designed the English Tudor-style clubhouse and a 1924 ballroom addition that established the club's physical character as a building meant to serve the intellectual and social ambitions of its university-adjacent membership. The architecture has been maintained and updated through subsequent decades while preserving the building's historical character.

The course underwent modification during the mid-twentieth century as maintenance priorities and equipment capabilities evolved, with some of Hunter and Watson's original features altered in ways typical of the era's approach to course management. Restoration-oriented work in more recent decades has sought to recover the course's Golden Age character. Today, Berkeley Country Club operates as an entirely private club in El Cerrito — technically distinct from Berkeley proper but immediately adjacent to the university community whose founding generation created it. The course's hilltop setting and its historical association with the Hunter-Watson design tradition give it a character rooted in early-twentieth-century California golf culture, and the panoramic views from its fairways remain among the most extraordinary of any private course in the Bay Area.