What’s the Best Way to Design a Master Plan?

Master planning isn’t just about arranging spaces on a blueprint—it’s about understanding how all the pieces of a complex puzzle fit together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Like the sun, where gravitational collapse is balanced by the outward force of nuclear fusion, successful master planning requires identifying the forces at play and finding the equilibrium that makes everything work.

When Master Planning Becomes Essential

Master planning proves most valuable when you’re facing seemingly separate priorities without a clear path forward. When stakeholders can’t agree on how to rank objectives or move forward independently, a comprehensive master plan can draw connections, reveal relationships, and bring disparate goals into alignment.

“When stakeholders can’t agree on how to rank objectives or move forward independently, a comprehensive master plan can draw connections, reveal relationships, and bring disparate goals into alignment.”

California’s Rancho La Quinta Country Club provides an excellent example of effective master planning. The club had a clear priority: reinventing their indoor-outdoor dining and bar area. But master planning revealed that this wasn’t an isolated project. The updated dining areas required an expanded service area to operate properly. Fitness facilities needed upgrading. What seemed like separate initiatives became interconnected components of a unified vision. The master plan showed how these pieces could work together efficiently and not compete for resources and attention.

Breaking Through Barriers

Sometimes master planning provides the breakthrough that’s needed when progress has stalled completely. At Forest Lake Country Club in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., outside of Detroit, members rejected an offer from Toll Brothers to purchase the property where their clubhouse sat. During a strategic-planning walkthrough, a simple question changed everything: “This is the best location in the whole clubhouse—what is going on in this room?”

The answer? A banquet room that rarely saw use.

The resulting master plan, now in its third stage of development, began by converting that underutilized space into a member bar, with another area transformed into a space for golf simulators. These changes didn’t just activate the clubhouse physically—they helped members envision how the facility could serve as a true social hub. The master plan gave them permission to see their space differently.

Comprehensive Problem-Solving

Perhaps most importantly, master planning can reveal opportunities to address challenges more thoroughly than originally envisioned—sometimes even accelerating solutions for issues that weren’t top priorities.

At Carmel Country Club in Charlotte, N.C., the pre-function area was located beyond the ballroom, forcing guests to walk past it to reach the event space. This awkward flow wasn’t initially a major concern for leadership. But as the master-planning process examined circulation patterns for the casual-dining venues on the lower level and how various spaces related to one another, an opportunity emerged.

By shifting a few elements and laying out new circulation paths, the planning team saw that it could solve the ballroom sequence problem, add private dining rooms, and accomplish everything within the project’s original goals and timeline. What had been secondary priorities were seamlessly integrated with higher-priority items—not through compromise, but with thoughtful thinking about the most effective design.

The Power of Connected Thinking

Fusion is, at its core, a destructive act—atoms are broken apart and forged into something new. Yet it’s that very energy that prevents the sun from collapsing under its own weight. In much the same way, the apparent conflict between competing club priorities isn’t a problem to be avoided—it’s the catalyst. When stakeholders challenge one another’s assumptions and competing visions collide, the resulting energy is what pushes back against the gravitational pull of old habits, deferred maintenance and institutional inertia.

Master planning channels that tension into balance, turning what seem to be separate challenges into an integrated, elegant solution—one where the forces that once threatened to pull a club apart become the very thing holding it together.

 

*Published in the 2026 Spring Edition of Club Director Magazine. McMahon Group is proud to be a Strategic Alliance Partner of the National Club Association.