Boca Woods Country Club: Lakes Course

Boca Woods Country Club is a 36-hole facility in Boca Raton designed by Joe Lee and opened in 1985, with the primary layout measuring 6,647 yards at par 72. Lee's two courses — North and South — wind through the mature tree canopy of western Boca Raton, where strategic water features and contoured green complexes define each hole.

Boca Woods Country Club opened in 1985 as one of the more ambitious private golf developments in Palm Beach County, offering a 36-hole facility with a membership cap that would ensure the kind of unhurried access that distinguishes the best private clubs from their more crowded counterparts. The original Woods Course was designed by Joe Lee, whose portfolio of Florida golf courses spanned more than two hundred designs and included landmark layouts like the Blue Monster at Doral. Lee's work at Boca Woods applied his characteristic understanding of South Florida terrain to a property that offered sufficient acreage and favorable conditions for a substantial private club. Joe Lee designed the Woods Course as a par-72 layout measuring 6,647 yards from the championship tees, incorporating the mature tree canopy that gave the course — and ultimately the club — its name. The wooded setting, relatively unusual for South Florida's typically open landscape, created a sense of enclosure and visual variety that distinguished the Woods Course from the more exposed layouts common to the region. The second course at Boca Woods, the Lakes Course, was designed by Karl Litten with water coming into play on fifteen of its eighteen holes. The combination of the wooded, tree-framed Woods Course and the more open, water-driven Lakes Course gave the club a genuine variety across its 36 holes, allowing members to alternate between two meaningfully different playing experiences without leaving the property. The membership cap of 590 golfers — remarkably limited for a 36-hole facility — ensured that both courses remained accessible and unhurried. The club's model proved durable through the transitions that affected many South Florida private clubs in the 1990s and 2000s. Boca Woods maintained its identity as a 36-hole private facility through decades of changing market conditions, ultimately setting the stage for a major reinvestment program in both courses that would reshape the facility in the 2020s. The Lakes Course underwent a renovation by Kipp Schulties, whose work on the South Florida private club circuit includes several significant redesign projects. Schulties rebuilt the Lakes Course with a focus on improving drainage, modernizing the bunker configurations, and enhancing the visual character of the water features that define the layout. The most significant investment in Boca Woods' recent history came with the commissioning of Rees Jones to redesign the Woods Course. Jones, known throughout the golf industry as "The Open Doctor" for his work preparing major championship venues, brought a different caliber of architectural investment to the project. The $9 million transformation, whose grand opening was celebrated in December 2024, completely rebuilt the greens — delivering smoother, more consistent putting surfaces — and repositioned and reshaped the bunkering throughout the course.The combination of the Rees Jones-redesigned Woods Course and the Kipp Schulties-renovated Lakes Course gives Boca Woods Country Club two updated, modern layouts for its limited membership, a genuine investment in the long-term quality of the facility.