Village Club of Sands Point

The Sands Point property was built in 1916 as an Italian Renaissance-style mansion estate for Isaac Guggenheim. After Guggenheim's death in 1949, IBM purchased the land and developed the IBM Country Club on roughly 208 acres as a corporate retreat through the 1950s. The Village of Sands Point purchased the estate in 1994, converting it from a corporate club into a municipal recreational facility -- now managed by KemperSports. The original 9-hole Robert Trent Jones Sr. course was expanded to its current 18-hole routing by Tom Doak in 2001.

This is a genuinely distinctive access model within the Gold Coast market: the Village of Sands Point's own code legally limits club use to Village residents and to nonresidents who pay Board-set fees, and the club's own current pricing confirms this structure directly -- $7,000/year for residents versus $9,000/year for nonresidents, with a Resident Social/Dining membership tier open only to residents. "Resident" for club purposes requires renting and occupying a dwelling in the Village for at least 60 days before applying. This is a real, codified residency-tied privilege structure -- distinct from the market's typical private invitation-only clubs, and a genuine example of golf access materially favoring a specific municipality's residents.