North Oaks Golf Club

The course was designed by Stanley Thompson, one of golf's most significant early-20th-century architects (Banff Springs, Jasper Park, Capilano), and North Oaks was the last course he designed before his death in 1953. It opened for public play in 1951 and converted to a private club in 1953 as the surrounding community began to build out. The club today operates as a private 18-hole facility with a clubhouse, dining, and practice facilities open to members.

Buying a home in North Oaks does not include or require North Oaks Golf Club membership -- membership is a separate application/payment process, with Golf and Social membership tiers (plus a discounted Young Professional tier for members under 40) and its own initiation fee and monthly dues. The club's own blog has discussed wait-list dynamics, and Social memberships were reported at capacity as of a recent club blog post, suggesting real demand constraints even though membership is not tied to the property itself. What every North Oaks resident does get, regardless of club membership, is life inside a private-road, HOA-governed city -- a different, community-wide form of exclusivity layered on top of, but distinct from, the golf club itself.

North Oaks is not a subdivision but an entire home-rule city built out by a single family-controlled development company over seven decades. Homes range from smaller lots near the original farm buildings to large estate parcels bordering the conservation land; the North Oaks Company has continued to release new phases of development (a subject of a recent legal settlement with the city over the pace of remaining build-out). The North Oaks Homeowners Association (NOHOA) governs virtually all of the city's infrastructure -- roads, plowing, parks, and recreational trails -- in place of the more limited role a homeowners association plays in most planned communities, because there is effectively no public property in North Oaks at all.

Beyond golf, the club offers clubhouse dining and event space; the broader city offers a swimming beach, parks, and an extensive network of private trails and conservation land (660+ acres in a Minnesota Land Trust easement, the metro area's largest).

North Oaks sits in Ramsey County roughly 20 minutes north of downtown St. Paul, positioning it as a north-metro counterpoint to the west-metro Lake Minnetonka old-guard club cluster and the south-metro Wilds/Prior Lake corridor.