Drive along Westgrove Drive this month and the fencing that has framed the back nine at Bent Tree Country Club for the better part of a year is finally starting to come down in sections. For anyone who has lived in Bent Tree through the closures, the aerial photos of bulldozed fairways, and the occasional rumor traded at the mailbox, the assumption has been simple: the golf course is getting redone. That is true, but it is also the smallest part of the real story. The course closing this year is not an isolated project. It is the final step in a rebuild that has been running, one system at a time, since 2021.
Most residents clocked the new clubhouse when it opened. Some noticed the tennis courts got a refresh a couple years later. Far fewer connected those two projects to the golf course closure that followed, because they happened years apart and never got billed as one continuous effort. But line them up and a pattern appears that says something about how a fifty-plus-year-old club decides what to fix first when it finally has the money and the will to fix everything.
A Club Built Before the Neighborhood Existed Around It
Bent Tree Country Club opened in 1972, founded by former Dallas Mayor Robert S. Folsom on land that had been part of the historic Shawnee Trail before it was cotton fields and pastureland. Architect Desmond Muirhead laid out the eighteen holes across roughly 200 acres of rolling terrain that, at the time, was mostly undeveloped ground north of LBJ Freeway. Aside from its neighbor Preston Trail, Bent Tree was the first significant golf course development in that part of North Dallas, and it was also something newer than that: the first project in the area to bundle golf and tennis directly into home sites rather than build the neighborhood first and hope a club showed up later.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. In most suburban developments, the golf course is an amenity added to sell lots. In Bent Tree, the club came first and the neighborhood grew up literally wrapped around it, which is why streets like Club Hill Drive back straight onto fairways and why longtime residents talk about the course less like a perk and more like the reason the place exists at all. The club has hosted LPGA and PGA Senior Tour events over the decades, including the LPGA's Mary Kay Classic, which is part of why a golf course renovation here carries more institutional weight than it would at a newer club.
The Order Things Got Fixed In
Here is the sequence, and it is worth reading in order rather than skimming, because the order is the point.
- 2021 to 2022: A new clubhouse, roughly 65,000 square feet, replaced the old facility with formal and casual dining, event space, a golf shop, and separate men's and women's lounges.
- 2023: The tennis and pickleball facilities were renovated, giving the racquets program under Director Chris Gale a fully updated indoor and outdoor setup.
- 2025: The golf course itself closed for a complete tee-to-green redesign, the first project in the sequence that took an entire piece of the property offline for a full season.
- Fall 2026: The course reopens, completing a rebuild that touched dining, racquets, and golf in that specific order.
Notice what did not happen. The club did not close everything at once and rebuild from scratch. It kept members eating, meeting, and playing tennis while it methodically worked toward the one closure that could not be avoided: taking eighteen holes out of play for a full year. Dining came first because a country club without a place to eat stops functioning as a social hub within weeks. Tennis came second because a court closure inconveniences a subset of members for a season. Golf came last, and took the longest, because a course renovation of this scope cannot be done in phases without leaving the layout in a permanent state of half-finished compromise.
Four different systems. Four different years. A club that will look, walking into it this fall, almost nothing like the one that existed before 2021.
The Architect Connecting Two Very Different Courses
The $32.5 million redesign was handled by Beau Welling, a name that carries specific weight in North Texas golf circles for reasons that have nothing to do with Bent Tree. Welling was the principal planner behind PGA Frisco and designed its Fields Ranch West Course, the public-facing centerpiece of the PGA of America's new headquarters campus about thirty miles north. That project is about as different from Bent Tree as a golf commission gets: brand new land, a public mandate, and a course built to host major championships in front of national television audiences.
Bent Tree is the opposite kind of assignment. It is a 1972 layout with fifty years of tree growth, drainage history, and member memory built into every hole, and the job was not to build something new but to honor what Muirhead designed while bringing the conditioning and strategy up to a modern standard. Welling has done this kind of legacy work elsewhere too. Earlier this year, Forbes covered his completed restoration of Stowe Country Club in Vermont, a project that similarly balanced a historic routing against a full tee-to-green rebuild. Seeing the same architect handle both a brand new PGA campus and a half-century-old private club in the same market says something about how seriously Bent Tree's membership took this decision. This was not a maintenance project. It was a deliberate choice about who gets to touch a course this old.
What Reopening Actually Changes for the Neighborhood
Bent Tree Country Club has always operated on an invitation basis for membership, and that will not change this fall. The reopening is not a public event, and nonmembers should not expect new access to tee times or the clubhouse. What does change, for every household in Bent Tree whether they golf or not, is what the neighborhood looks like from the street and from the backyard.
Homes on Club Hill Drive and other streets that border the course have spent a year looking out over construction equipment and stripped fairways. This fall, those same views return as finished turf, reshaped bunkers, and a layout that Welling's team spent an entire growing season establishing. For a neighborhood where the golf course functions as shared green space even for residents who never pick up a club, that visual return matters. It is the difference between a backyard view of a closed job site and a backyard view of the amenity that gave the neighborhood its name and its original shape.
The timing also lines up with the part of the year Bent Tree residents already treat as social season. Bent Tree North's HOA runs an active calendar that includes a Spring Picnic drawing more than a hundred attendees, a recurring Ladies Book Club, mahjong nights, and a Spring Fling, all of which happened while the golf course sat closed. That calendar never depended on the club being whole, which is worth noting on its own. Bent Tree's identity as a neighborhood has never rested entirely on one amenity. But a fall reopening means the club's own event calendar, the member dinners, the holiday gatherings, the first rounds played on a finished course, folds back into a neighborhood rhythm that kept going without it.
A Landmark Coming Back Whole
What makes this fall different from a typical golf course reopening is the four-year arc behind it. A club that fixes its dining room, then its tennis courts, then finally commits to a full season of course closure is a club that planned this out rather than reacting to one bad review or one broken irrigation system. The sequencing tells you the club valued keeping members engaged over rushing the hardest project. That is a slower, more deliberate way to rebuild an institution, and it is why the reopening this fall reads less like a single announcement and more like the final chapter of something that has been unfolding in plain sight since 2021.
For a neighborhood that was built around this club before most of its current residents ever moved in, having it return whole is not a small thing. It is the landmark the streets were named for, finished at last.
If you live in Bent Tree, or in one of the neighborhoods nearby that share its history with Preston Trail, Glen Abbey, or Cambridge, and you ever want to talk through what is changing in the area, The Bracchi Group is always glad to be a resource. Reach out any time.
