Bonita Bay Club: Cypress Course

Bonita Bay Club is one of Southwest Florida's most architecturally distinguished private clubs, a 90-hole facility spread across two sites — Bonita Springs and Naples — whose five championship courses represent the work of two of the most celebrated architects in American golf: Arthur Hills and Tom Fazio. The club's founding traces to 1985, when David Shakarian, founder of the Bonita Bay Group, began developing 2,400 acres in what was then a rustic fishing village north of Naples' established quality real estate market. Shakarian's vision emphasized environmental stewardship as a design principle, not merely a regulatory requirement, and the Bonita Bay development became a model for ecologically sensitive master-planned community development in Southwest Florida.

The golf program began in 1985 with the Marsh Course, the first of Arthur Hills's three designs for the Bonita Springs site. Hills, a Michigan-based architect with deep roots in Florida private club design, created a layout whose fairways weave through the wetland landscape characteristic of Southwest Florida — integrating the natural hydrological systems of the region rather than eliminating them. The Creekside course followed in 1989, and Hills completed his third Bonita Springs design — the Bay Island course — in 1994, giving the original Bonita Springs site three distinct 18-hole experiences across nine years of development.

The Naples expansion added a second site with two Tom Fazio-designed courses: the Cypress Course (1997) and the Sabal Course (1998). Both layouts occupy a 1,400-acre nature preserve in Collier County, with fairways framed by stands of native cypress, pine, and sabal palm trees that give the courses a distinct ecological character. Fazio's designs for the Naples site demonstrate his mastery of the Southwest Florida landscape — using the preserve setting to create visual isolation and strategic depth without the manicured homogeneity that can characterize less environmentally integrated developments.

The five courses give Bonita Bay members an unusual breadth of golf experience within a single club: Hills's wetland-integrated Bonita Springs designs offer a different visual and strategic character from Fazio's preserve-framed Naples layouts, with distinct architectural personalities across all five 18-hole configurations. The club has received recognition in LINKS Magazine and Top 100 Golf Courses listings for multiple courses, reflecting the consistent quality across the full five-course portfolio. The Bonita Bay Club operates as a private member-owned club serving the residential communities at both the Bonita Springs and Naples sites, maintaining the environmental commitments that distinguished the original Bonita Bay development from its earliest years.