Crystal Downs vs. Forest Dunes for Golf Living

Crystal Downs (1927-29) is Alister MacKenzie and Perry Maxwell's work, rated by the Alister MacKenzie Society among MacKenzie's four best designs alongside Cypress Point, Royal Melbourne, and Augusta National — golden-age architecture that has remained essentially unaltered for nearly a century. Forest Dunes' pedigree is modern: Tom Weiskopf's original 2002 course, and especially Tom Doak's 2016 Loop, a single reversible 36-hole routing (playable clockwise or counterclockwise on alternating days) that won Golf Digest's Best New Public Course honors as one combined entry — an unprecedented design achievement. Both Loop routings now rank among Golf Digest's national public-access Top 50, placing Forest Dunes among a handful of American resort properties (with Pebble Beach, Streamsong, Bandon Dunes, and Kohler) with three courses in that tier.

Crystal Downs is a private, member-owned club that reached full membership by 1989 and has carried a waiting list since — there is no way to simply pay a green fee and play. Forest Dunes' existing courses operate on the opposite model: standard public daily-fee golf (reported $95-$185 green fees), open to anyone, no membership or waitlist required. That said, Forest Dunes is adding a private layer: SkyFall, a new Gil Hanse/Jim Wagner course announced in January 2025, will be membership-based (reported around 100 founding members plus roughly 150 additional members) when it opens, targeted for 2028 — a real, in-progress shift that did not exist as of this research date and does not affect access to the existing Forest Dunes/Loop courses.

Crystal Downs' residential story is essentially finished and organic: a roughly one-square-mile neighborhood built in the same 1920s era as the club, by some of the same people, that has stayed a fixed, historic footprint ever since — homes and lots there run roughly $800,000 to $3 million-plus, but membership in the club is confirmed NOT guaranteed by buying there. Forest Dunes' residential story is active and ongoing: individually-owned cottages (some directly on the course, others on Lake AuSable) enrolled in a rental-management program, plus a live custom-homesite program that this research confirmed is marketed as available to both members and non-members — directly contradicting a secondary marketing claim (found on a real-estate-aggregator site) that homesite ownership there 'guarantees' club membership. Neither claim was confirmable against Forest Dunes' own primary site this session (blocked by network egress), so buyers should treat Forest Dunes' exact lot-to-membership relationship as still needing direct confirmation.

There is no universal winner — these serve very different buyers. Someone drawn to golden-age architecture, an established and finite historic neighborhood, and the prestige of a legacy MacKenzie club (while accepting that club membership itself is a separate, private, waitlisted pursuit) has more of that at Crystal Downs. Someone drawn to cutting-edge modern golf design, the ability to simply show up and play without any membership at all, and an active, still-growing residential program with real current homesite availability has more of that at Forest Dunes — while watching how SkyFall's new private layer develops over the next few years. Both require independent confirmation of current pricing and terms directly with each club; neither publishes a complete current fee schedule that this research could confirm.