Drive past the Pinewild gates on Glasgow Drive this fall and the first thing you notice isn't a golfer or a valet cart. It's the framing. The clubhouse that has anchored this community since 1989 is, in the club's own words, down to the studs. Trees cleared. Grading underway. The old scoreboard area now an open patch of dirt where a new ballroom will eventually stand.
If you live here, you've probably already heard the headline number: eighteen million dollars, a clubhouse expanding from roughly 12,800 square feet to 26,000, and a completion target of early 2027. What the headline doesn't tell you is how little of daily life at Pinewild actually depends on that building. The golf hasn't slowed. The lake hasn't drained. The pool opened on schedule. What's missing is narrower than the construction photos suggest, and understanding exactly what that gap is, and isn't, is the difference between treating this as a lost year and treating it as the one everyone will talk about later.
The Renovation Is Bigger Than the Disruption
Start with what construction crews are actually touching. The $18 million project, designed by S3 Design of Braintree, Massachusetts, is rebuilding the clubhouse's core: a signature restaurant, private dining rooms, a new ballroom, expanded locker rooms, and reimagined golf and tennis retail space. Construction began in mid-December 2025, and the club has been documenting progress in monthly bulletins ever since. The March 2026 update showed grading complete and framing underway around what will become the new golf shop and locker room, with the ballroom set to rise above it. By April, the ballroom's foundation was nearing completion and crews were preparing the pad for a new fitness center. As of that April update, the project remained on what the club called its critical path toward Q1 2027.
None of that touches the golf courses, the pool, or Lake Pinewild. The Magnolia and Holly courses are still in play, and if anything, they're getting more attention right now, not less. Pinewild brought on Curtis Proctor as director of golf course maintenance, a hire announced last year after Proctor spent years as a superintendent at Pinehurst Resort, including oversight of the famed No. 1 course and The Cradle. Proctor now runs agronomy across all 48 holes at Pinewild, and his arrival was framed by club leadership as a long-term investment in course conditions, not a stopgap. The Junior Olympic saltwater pool is unaffected. The 25-acre lake off Stoneykirk Drive, accessible through Pinewild Park for canoes, kayaks, and battery-powered boats, hasn't been touched by a single piece of construction equipment.
So the actual disruption isn't "the club is under construction." It's narrower: the clubhouse itself, as a physical gathering place for meals and events, is gone until early 2027. Everything built around it, golf, agronomy, the lake, the pool, keeps running on its normal calendar.
Why Pinewild Chose the Slow, Expensive Way
It would have been cheaper and faster to patch the existing building. Club leadership chose not to. Chris Card, CEO of Pinewild and co-CEO of IE Homes, Clubs & Resorts, has been direct about why in trade coverage of the project.
"We knew that many of these members have been a part of Pinewild since its inception, and the memories made in that clubhouse were precious. We wanted to honor that, so a down-to-the-studs renovation allowed us to build upon that history, while still providing a significant overhaul of the member experience."
That's a specific tradeoff, not a marketing line. A lighter renovation would have meant less disruption now and less capacity later. IE Homes bought Pinewild in 2023, and the idea of a clubhouse overhaul had reportedly been circulating even before that sale closed. Choosing the full rebuild instead of a facelift is why members are looking at bare studs today instead of a repainted dining room, and why the finished building, at more than double its old footprint, will include things Pinewild has never had before: a dedicated fitness center and exercise studio, and a standalone racquet sports shop.
The Part That Actually Changes Your Week
Here's where the disruption gets real for anyone who used the clubhouse for more than a tee time. Pinewild's dining program, run by Executive Chef Todd Martin, has built its member calendar around a rotating set of themed nights: Trivia Challenge Nights, Thursday Night Dining, Valentine's and St. Paddy's Day dinners, Couples Golf Event Dinners, a Super Bowl party, and Grand Ballroom-style brunch buffets for Easter and Mother's Day. Martin trained in classical French and Italian cuisine and came to Pinewild after stints at Casa Monica Hotel in St. Augustine and The Tower Club in Fort Lauderdale. That calendar is the social infrastructure of the club, arguably more than the golf course is for a lot of members.
What the club hasn't spelled out publicly is exactly where that dining program is operating while the kitchen and dining room are being rebuilt from the foundation up. That's a genuine open question right now, not a gap in this article. If Thursday Night Dining still exists in some form this fall, it's happening somewhere other than the building in the construction photos. The most reliable way to know for certain is the same place the club has been posting its own progress: those monthly clubhouse updates on Pinewild's site. They're dated, specific, and written for members, which makes them a better source than secondhand rumor at the gate.
In the meantime, Pinewild's own site notes there are roughly twenty restaurants within a short drive, split between the Village of Pinehurst a mile away and the broader Southern Pines and Aberdeen area. For a community that built its identity around a five-minute walk to the dining room, that's a real shift in routine, even if it's temporary.
What Arrives When the Studs Are Covered Again
The completed clubhouse isn't just a restoration. It's new territory for members who play tennis or pickleball. Pinewild is adding Har-Tru tennis and pickleball courts alongside a new Tennis Pro Shop, with a dedicated Racquet Sports Director and support staff arriving in early 2027, timed to the clubhouse's completion. That's a category of amenity Pinewild has never offered as a standalone program. The fitness center and exercise studio are the same story: entirely new, not rebuilt.
That timing matters for how you should think about this year. The disruption ends roughly when the new amenities start, which means the gap most members are living through right now is front-loaded. The back half of this transition looks less like inconvenience and more like a waiting room for things Pinewild didn't have before.
The Other Construction Zone
The clubhouse isn't the only project moving on Pinewild's grounds this year. Azalea Place, a 77-home neighborhood inside the gates, broke ground as the first major club-based homebuilding program in Pinehurst in more than a decade, according to Sandhills Sentinel's coverage of the groundbreaking. Home sales for the new neighborhood opened that same fall, and the project is being run through Pinewild Builders, with leadership including executive project director Albin Tarry and chief operating officer Clegg Wellborn. If you're driving past cleared lots on top of a gutted clubhouse, that's two separate construction timelines overlapping, not one project running long.
The practical takeaway for anyone living inside the gates this year: expect two active job sites through at least part of 2026, expect the golf and lake to run exactly as they always have, and expect the one meaningful gap, communal dining and events, to be filled unevenly until early 2027. The club's own monthly bulletins are the most current word on where things stand, more current than this article will be in a few months. Check them before you plan around a Thursday Night Dining that may or may not be happening in its usual form.
Pinewild members have sat through renovations before, just never one this deliberately slow or this expensive. The studs are the price of a clubhouse built to last another forty years instead of another ten. For now, the golf is fine, the lake is fine, and dinner is somewhere other than where it used to be.
If you're watching Pinewild from the outside and wondering what a community mid-transformation actually looks like day to day, or you're already inside the gates and want a second set of eyes on what these changes mean for your home's place in the neighborhood, Kelly Ward has been tracking Pinewild closely through all of it. Let's Connect.
