The Bel-Air Country Club is one of the most exclusive, historically significant, and structurally unique private clubs in the United States. Oil magnate and real estate developer Alphonzo E. Bell Sr. founded the club in 1926 as the centerpiece of his Bel-Air Estates development; he had hired golf architect George C. Thomas Jr. the previous year to lay out the course, which formally opened for play in 1927. Bell subsidized the club’s operations until 1940, when ownership passed to the membership.
Located at 10768 Bellagio Road, the club sits directly adjacent to the UCLA campus. It is widely celebrated for its tight-knit, conversational membership culture and an audacious 18-hole golf routing that defies traditional landscape logic.
The Masterpiece of “The Captain”
The golf course architect Captain George C. Thomas Jr. designed the course with his frequent collaborator William “Billy” Bell, with amateur architect Jack Neville — later of Pebble Beach fame — assisting on the routing. Thomas, who also designed nearby Riviera Country Club and the North Course at the Los Angeles Country Club, faced a seemingly impossible task: fitting a cohesive 18-hole layout across a property broken into four rugged, separate canyons. According to his biographer Geoff Shackelford, Bel-Air was reportedly the course Thomas himself was proudest of, precisely because of that challenge.
To make the steep, fractured terrain walkable, Thomas and Bell implemented a series of engineering marvels that remain iconic features of the course today:
- The Tunnels: Subterranean tunnels cut through the canyon walls to guide players from one isolated valley to the next, most notably before the 6th hole (running from the 5th green, under Bellagio Road and a private estate) and before the 11th hole (linking the 10th green to the 11th tee).
- The Elevator: A private elevator, reached through a tunnel after the 9th green, lifts golfers up to the clubhouse terrace before they descend again to the 10th tee.
- The Suspension Bridge: The course’s defining visual landmark is a white swinging suspension bridge spanning a deep ravine just after the 10th tee shot. It also serves as a scenic backdrop behind the 18th green.
What is often overlooked is how deftly Thomas disguised these connective devices as golf holes in their own right. The short par-3 3rd and par-3 16th, for instance, each climb to a notch at the base of a hill purely so the tunnel beyond could be as short as possible — yet both are remembered as distinctive, well-bunkered holes rather than mere passageways between canyons. Because the canyon floors were often too narrow to safely fit fairways running in opposite directions, Thomas also staggered landing areas hole to hole to keep golfers out of one another’s lines of fire.
Architectural Evolution and the Tom Doak Restoration
Over the decades, the course underwent successive alterations by well-known architects: Dick Wilson in 1962, Robert Trent Jones Sr. in 1974, and later Tom Fazio. These renovations modernized irrigation, reworked bunkering, and introduced water features not part of Thomas’s original design — changes significant enough that Thomas’s own daughter, a longtime member, reportedly boycotted the club after the 1962 work.
To restore its Golden Age character, the club hired acclaimed minimalist architect Tom Doak and his firm, Renaissance Golf Design, for a comprehensive restoration that began in 2017 and was completed in 2018. The project stripped away decades of cosmetic changes and revived much of Thomas’s original strategy and bunkering, helping push Bel-Air back into the upper tier of America’s ranked courses for the first time in three decades.
Before agreeing to lead the restoration, Doak had already named Bel-Air’s routing as the one he would most want to bring back to its original character if given the chance, calling Thomas’s plan for the property possibly the most spectacular routing ever conceived. The 2018 restoration has since been credited with lifting Bel-Air to its highest position among Golf Digest’s national course rankings in more than thirty years.
The course serves as the home layout for the UCLA Bruins men’s and women’s golf teams and remains a premier competitive venue — in June 2026 it hosted the 44th Curtis Cup match, with Bel-Air’s centennial adding extra weight to the occasion. It previously hosted the LPGA Championship in 1972 and 1973 and the U.S. Senior Open in 1984, and in 2023 it staged the U.S. Women’s Amateur, where Megan Schofill defeated Latanna Stone in the final.
Legend holds that the routing itself was settled with a golf swing. Standing on the hilltop where the clubhouse and 1st tee would go, Thomas and his collaborators looked across a wide ravine toward an adjoining canyon Bell also owned, and wondered whether a ball could be carried across it. Neville, playing first, cleared the gap with a Ray Mills aluminum-headed putter, and Thomas followed suit. The successful shot confirmed that a hole — the eventual par-3 10th — could bridge the two canyons, unlocking the back nine and the need for the tunnel, elevator, and bridge that followed.
Hollywood History and Membership Culture
While some neighboring clubs cultivate a more buttoned-up, reserved atmosphere, Bel-Air has long been known for a livelier, more conversational social dynamic. Its membership rolls have included Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Randolph Scott, and Howard Hughes in decades past, and modern-era members reported to include Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, and Tom Cruise, among many other entertainment-industry figures. In May 1950, the club hosted the reception for Elizabeth Taylor’s first wedding, to hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr.
The course is the birthplace of a favorite piece of Hollywood lore. In the mid-1930s, aviator and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, smitten with actress Katharine Hepburn, circled the course in a small plane and landed it on a fairway to crash a golf lesson she was taking with the club pro. Hepburn herself recounted the story in her memoir, describing Hughes landing “practically on top of” her and the pro as they finished up a nine-hole lesson. Accounts differ on exactly which fairway he touched down on — most place the landing at the 7th or 8th hole, where the lesson was actually taking place, while a few sources point instead to the 14th fairway, near which Hepburn lived. Either way, club stewards were reportedly furious, and the plane had to be partially dismantled and trucked off the property.
The New Clubhouse
In 2021, the club began an extensive modernization project by demolishing its original 1926 Spanish Colonial clubhouse — designed by Southern California architect Carleton Winslow — to build a larger, state-of-the-art facility designed by the firm Marsh & Associates, Inc. (MAI), echoing the original building’s style and layout. The new clubhouse, completed in 2023 in time for the club’s centennial, measures roughly 62,000 square feet, though some published accounts of the project cite a figure closer to 64,000 square feet.
The new building honors the club’s heritage by reusing salvaged stonework from the original structure and reincorporating four historic fireplace hearths from the old members’ card room. Upgraded amenities include more than ten times the previous outdoor patio and terrace space, panoramic views over the 1st and 10th tees, expanded dining venues such as a formal main dining room and a more casual grill, a custom wine vault, and on-site overnight guest accommodations — a rarity among Los Angeles’s private clubs. The project was designed to be finished in time for the club’s 2026 centennial, and it earned MAI’s design team industry recognition, including clubhouse-of-the-year and wine-room-of-the-year honors.
Together, the century-old routing and the newly rebuilt clubhouse capture what has always set Bel-Air apart: a course that treats its impossible canyon site as an asset rather than an obstacle, wrapped around a social scene that has drawn Hollywood’s elite from the studio era to the present day.
