The Work-From-Club Movement: Designing Clubhouses for a Productive Member Day

Across the country, we are watching a subtle but important behavior shift take hold, especially among younger, professionally active members. They are no longer treating the clubhouse as a place they visit only after the workday ends. Increasingly, they want their clubs to support the full member day: A place where they can be productive for an hour, take a confidential call, meet a colleague, then seamlessly transition into fitness, golf, dining, and family time.

Two real-world examples illustrate why this is not theoretical.

At the Missouri Athletic Club, demand for business-ready space is not hypothetical—it is showing up in daily utilization. As General Manager Donald “Chip” Misch, CCM, puts it, “We have private workspaces at our Downtown and West campuses, and many times they are on a waitlist or over-subscribed.  When we met with focus groups at our [suburban] Clayton facility, one of the key takeaways was the need for coworking space, and we actually added that to our plan.”

At Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles, members approved a new $47.7 million clubhouse with strong support (84.4%)—a clear signal of confidence in a forward-looking program. What is especially relevant about a project of this caliber is not just the three-level layout, the indoor/outdoor flow, expanded dining, and upgraded locker rooms. It is the inclusion of purpose-built business accommodations—spaces that recognize members may need a quiet, private place to handle a Zoom meeting, take a sensitive call, or step away from the energy of the clubhouse to review an electronic document without leaving the property.

Why Now: Merging Work, Home, and Club Life

These examples illustrate the pattern we see nationally: Once members have access to discreet, reliable places to take a call, join a Zoom meeting, or knock out focused work, those spaces quickly become some of the most utilized—and most appreciated—square footage in the clubhouse.

Before COVID, many professionals tried to keep work, home, and leisure separate—three distinct worlds with clear boundaries. In the post-COVID era, we see those realms melding together like never before, and particularly for members whose work can travel with them on a laptop or iPad. The illustration at left captures the shift: Instead of separate circles, members’ lives now overlap in ways that make working from the club feel natural and, for many, essential.

This is reinforced by broader workforce patterns. Tracking by Gallup continues to show that the majority of remote-capable employees work in hybrid or fully remote arrangements, and that most remote-capable employees prefer hybrid flexibility over fully on-site work. Even in organizations that are now encouraging—or even demanding—more office time from their employees, the reality remains that members can—and do—work from anywhere. The question for clubs is whether they will provide a setting that supports productivity in a way that fits club culture.

What Members Actually Want

In our observations, “working from the club” typically shows up in two distinct ways.

The first way is through casual productivity. It may be practiced by a member who arrives early for lunch and answers e-mails in a comfortable lounge. Or, by a parent who gets settled near a coffee bar while waiting for a family member to finish an activity. Or by another member who hangs out in the smoothie bar by the pool, shops online, reviews travel plans or knocks out quick tasks between a workout and a late-afternoon tee time. 

In all cases, these members do not need a dedicated office suite. They need reliable Wi-Fi, convenient power, comfortable seating, good lighting, and a setting where quiet focus feels socially acceptable.

The second way is through private focus. This is where clubs either deliver an exceptional experience or create friction. Increasingly, members need short windows of privacy for video meetings, confidential calls, or sensitive conversations—often in the middle of an otherwise leisure-oriented club day. When a club has a few small, reservable phone rooms or “pods,” members immediately understand their value. When it does not, members improvise in hallways, corners, or locker-room lobbies—“solutions” that compromise privacy and can unintentionally erode the atmosphere for others.

The important takeaway is this: Members are not asking clubs to become corporate workplaces. They are asking clubs to accommodate their modern lives in a way that feels seamless and discreet.

Business-ready Zones That Fit the Culture

Boards sometimes worry that adding coworking space means turning the clubhouse into a co-working brand. But the best clubs like Bel Aire Country Club and the Missouri Athletic Club are proving the opposite: With thoughtful design and location, clubs can support productivity and still protect the social heartbeat of the clubhouse.

The formula is less about adding square footage and more about intentional zoning. Work-friendly areas should be close enough to the clubhouse’s energy that they feel connected, but also separate enough—through placement, acoustics, and subtle etiquette—that they do not compete with dining, bar, and gathering spaces. These are truly “third spaces”—not the office, and not the home, but a comfortable extension of both.

This is also where operational clarity matters. Members appreciate a club that sets quiet expectations in designated areas, provides a simple method of reserving private rooms, and designs spaces that support confidentiality. In other words, the club’s culture doesn’t get diluted by workspaces—it gets reinforced by doing them thoughtfully.

Giving Space the Proper Purpose

Not every club needs a major capital project to meet this need. In fact, some of the most successful solutions we see are created by repurposing underutilized areas, such as a library that is rarely used, a dated sitting room, a card nook that is seldom active outside peak hours, or even an overlooked corner near an all-day coffee or juice bar.

What matters is that the space feels purposeful. Members will tolerate a small footprint, but not when the basics are missing: convenient power, comfortable posture, lighting that works, and the ability to take a call without becoming part of everyone else’s conversation.

This is why coffee bars and casual-lounge zones have become “ground zero” for modern club life. They naturally support short, informal visits. They serve members who are waiting on family or friends. And they encourage members to stay on property longer—often leading to additional use of dining, wellness, golf, and retail.

Airport Lounges Solved This Years Ago

While clubs should never feel like airports, there is a practical lesson worth noting. Premium airport lounges recognized long ago that travelers sometimes need privacy inside a hospitality environment. Delta Sky Clubs, for example, have incorporated sound-proof telephone booths for focused work in many of its lounges. The logic is straightforward: People want to relax, but they occasionally need a quiet space to handle something important. If that need exists in a high-traffic lounge, it certainly exists in private clubs, where members expect comfort, discretion, and a sense that the club supports their real life.

A Necessity, Not an Amenity

Clubs have always been places where business relationships happen. What has changed is the medium. Business now happens through cloud platforms, rapid video calls, and mobile calendars, and members need privacy in smaller, more frequent intervals than they did a decade ago.

That is why we increasingly view “work from club” not as a boutique feature, but as a relevance issue. When clubs support the productive member day, members don’t just visit—they linger. A short work session turns into lunch. Lunch turns into fitness. Fitness becomes nine holes, and nine holes becomes dinner. The club becomes the center of the day, not simply the destination after everything else is finished.

The examples from Bel-Air and the Missouri Athletic Club show the spectrum of possibilities, from large-scale reinvention to highly practical business accommodations. But the direction is consistent everywhere: Modern members expect their club to flex with their lives. The clubs that respond thoughtfully, by protecting culture while enabling productivity, are positioning themselves for stronger engagement, deeper loyalty, and a clubhouse that works the way members live today.