The Estate Course Never Needed a Membership. Its Replacement Will.
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Drive out along the west end of PGA National, roughly eight miles from the clubhouse where the Cognizant Classic gets its cameras every February, and you'll find a golf course most visitors to the resort never see. It winds through Bay Hill Estates, a gated pocket of 240 single-family homes tucked against Grassy Waters Preserve. For years, the Karl Litten-designed layout there ran on a different rule than every other course carrying the PGA National name: you didn't need a membership card to play it.
That rule is about to disappear.
On September 16, 2026, PGA National Resort announced that the Estate Course is being rebuilt from the ground up into something called Triple Stick Golf Club, a members-only enclave with a new par-70 course designed by Love Golf Design, the firm run by World Golf Hall of Fame member Davis Love III, and a clubhouse from the South Florida architecture firm Peacock + Lewis. The new course is set to open later this year, with the clubhouse following after. If you live near that course, or you've ever walked a dog past its fairways without a second thought, this is worth understanding before the fences go up.
PGA National's identity has always rested on scale: six courses, ninety-nine holes, a Jack Nicklaus-designed Bear Trap that has chewed up PGA Tour pros for two decades. But the Estate Course was the outlier in that lineup. It sat apart from the main resort, managed by PGA National Golf Club yet accessible to Bay Hill Estates residents without the membership requirement that governs the Champion, Fazio, Palmer, and Match courses closer to the clubhouse.
That distinction mattered. It meant a homeowner in Bay Hill Estates could golf on a Karl Litten layout, one with a closing stretch along the 16th and 17th holes hugging a canal, without paying for the same access that comes with belonging to the broader PGA National Members Club. It was quieter, shorter at just under 6,700 yards, and by most accounts more forgiving than its sister courses. It was also, structurally, an exception to how the rest of the community operates.
The new Triple Stick Golf Club follows the routing of the old Estates Course but changes almost everything else about what that land offers. The practice area comes from Love Golf Design. The clubhouse, described in the announcement as a space meant to enhance social connection and celebrate natural light, comes from Peacock + Lewis, the North Palm Beach-based firm that has designed clubhouses for private clubs across South Florida.
Rob Duckett, Managing Director of Golf and Club Operations for Henderson Park, called the redevelopment "an extraordinary evolution for PGA National Resort" in the announcement. Henderson Park is the international private equity real estate firm that purchased the 807-acre PGA National Resort in 2025 in a joint venture, with Salamander Collection, the hospitality group founded by Sheila Johnson, operating the property.
Here's what's confirmed so far, and what isn't:
That last gap matters more than it might seem. The entire appeal of the Estate Course for its immediate neighbors was that it sat outside the membership economy. Triple Stick Golf Club, by design, puts it back inside.
This isn't an isolated decision. It's the latest step in a pattern that started well before Henderson Park bought the property. PGA National completed a $100 million renovation in recent years that touched nearly every part of the resort: The Butcher's Club, the steakhouse from Miami chef Jeremy Ford; Honeybelle, the Southern-inflected restaurant from James Beard Award nominee Lindsay Autry; a redesigned spa from Venus Williams's design firm, V Starr; and the Staple course, a nine-hole par-3 layout that opened in 2021 as PGA National's answer to the short-course trend sweeping golf.
Every one of those additions raised the resort's profile as a destination. None of them touched the one piece of the community that had operated outside the membership structure. Triple Stick Golf Club closes that gap. Read against the last three years of investment, the Estate Course's conversion isn't a standalone announcement. It's the last piece of PGA National's amenity base to fall in line with how the rest of the resort already runs: through membership, not proximity.
For residents, that's the real story here. The renovation cycle that gave PGA National its new restaurants and its reworked spa was easy to enjoy without changing how anyone lived day to day. This one does. If your household played the Estate Course as a matter of geography rather than membership status, that option is closing, even as construction crews are still measuring fairways.
Not everything at PGA National is in flux. The Cognizant Classic returns to the Champion Course February 24 through 28, 2027, marking the 21st consecutive year the tournament has been held there since 2007. Whatever else changes about membership structure or clubhouse design out at Bay Hill Estates, that week in late February remains the community's most reliable fixture: closed roads near Ryder Cup Boulevard, a spike in short-term rental activity, and a Bear Trap that will once again decide the tournament on national television.
It's a useful contrast. The Champion Course's rhythm is public and predictable. The Estate Course's future is private and still being written. Residents who've spent years orienting their golf calendar around one should expect to start orienting the other around a membership office instead.
None of this means PGA National is becoming less livable. If anything, a Davis Love III redesign and a Peacock + Lewis clubhouse are the kind of investment that tends to lift the profile of everything around it, including home values in Bay Hill Estates itself. But livability and access aren't the same thing, and the distinction is worth sitting with if you're the kind of resident who used the old course the way it was built to be used: casually, locally, without a membership card.
The construction fencing going up this fall marks something more specific than a course renovation. It marks the end of the last exception to how PGA National distributes access to its own golf. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on whether you were one of the people who benefited from the exception in the first place.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near PGA National, or you're simply trying to keep track of how the neighborhood's amenities are shifting, Hughes Browne Group tracks these changes as part of covering the communities we work in every day. Start a Conversation if you want a local read on what's happening on the ground.
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