Our Story
Robbi Raitt came to Augusta for the golf in 1995 and found there was nowhere decent to go afterwards. Nineteen seasons later the club still stands on the same street — and still comes down every April.
1995 · The first trip
I came to Augusta for the first time in 1995. A young amateur named Tiger Woods was making his debut that year, and the whole city felt like it was leaning forward.
The golf was everything I had been promised. The rest of the week was not. When the round finished there was nowhere to go — nowhere with a good table, a good chair and someone who knew your name. You went back to a hotel room and waited for the next morning.
That gap stayed with me for more than a decade. Not as a business plan. As an irritation. The best week of golf in the world, and the hours around it were an afterthought.
When I finally did something about it, it was not a venue. It was a modest ranch house at 1023 Magnolia Drive — a normal house on a normal street, a few minutes from the gates. It is the address the club still occupies today.
It was a ranch house on Magnolia Drive. That was the whole plan.Robbi Raitt, founder
A vision beyond the course
The idea was never to compete with the tournament. It was to look after the other eighteen hours of the day.
A member should be able to arrive without a plan and still have a good evening. That means somebody takes the car. Somebody knows the name. There is a kitchen open whenever you are hungry, not only between six and eight. There is a bar you can hear yourself talk in, and another one you cannot, and both are five minutes apart.
It also means the club does not sell you anything twice. Membership covers the food, the bars, the transport and the service. Nobody reaches for a wallet on the property.
Nineteen years on, that is still the only brief. Everything else — the nine premium bars, the twenty-five named destinations, the guest chefs — came out of asking the same question every April: what did the week still not do well enough?
The golf was never the problem. The hours around it were.Robbi Raitt, founder
Built by family, and by many hands
My mother Pat lived in California. We built the first club together across three thousand miles and two fax machines.
Her background was in immersive retail environments and trade-show experiences — rooms designed so that a person walking through them feels something specific at each turn. She understood before I did that a hospitality club is not catering with a marquee over it. It is a sequence: arrival, threshold, the first drink, the room you did not expect, the way out. She drew those sequences by hand and sent them east in the middle of the night.
We worked that way for years. She was part of every season until her passing in 2013.
My wife Pam was part of it from the start, and still is. Our daughter was born in Augusta during tournament week in 2009 — the club has genuinely never had a quiet April since.
And then there is everyone else. More than a hundred team members now work the seven days: valets, shuttle drivers, concierges, bartenders, chefs, shuckers, pit crews, barbers, massage therapists. Management between them has more than thirty years in hospitality and events. Most of them come back year after year, which is the reason members are recognised on arrival rather than processed.
We built a club by fax machine, three thousand miles apart.Robbi Raitt, on working with his mother Pat
From the archive
Four photographs held in the club's files. All four need proper scans, and one needs replacing outright.
The 2016 staff photograph is the only group portrait in the archive. With more than a hundred team members now, a fresh one is being scheduled for the coming season.
Soul over imitation
Augusta fills up with hospitality every April, and a great deal of it is the same operation under a different logo. We have turned down every opportunity to become that, usually at some cost.
There are three things the club has refused to be since the ranch-house years. They are the reason members can tell you where they were standing when something happened.
Not this
A marquee with a bar in it is a tent, whatever the invitation calls it. Our rooms have floors, walls, ceilings, sightlines and thresholds. The Grand Marquee sits above the club as a room with a view, not a shelter with a queue.
Soul over imitation
Not this
Nothing here was bought as a package. Every room was designed for the building it sits in — the lounge, the beer garden, the Sky Deck bar, the sculpture garden. Twenty-five named destinations, none of them interchangeable.
Soul over imitation
Not this
The hardest thing to avoid is the feeling of having been somewhere generic. Southern service, a named concierge, a kitchen that already knows what you cannot eat — that is what stops the week feeling like every other week.
Soul over imitation
A tent is a tent. We were never going to be a tent.Robbi Raitt, founder
Still evolving
The club opened its doors and has hosted one week every April since. It has grown almost beyond recognition and, according to the people who were there at the beginning, somehow feels the same.
Nine premium bars. Twenty-five named destinations across just under an acre. Twenty-two kitchens. More than a hundred team members. Guest chefs cooking a different menu every night from Wednesday.
Every one of those numbers came from a member telling us something was missing. The decks came later. So did the al fresco patio, the sculpture garden, Loblolly and the Sky Deck bar. Next season will add something too, and we already have a fair idea what.
Pat is not here to draw it. Pam still is. The daughter born during tournament week is old enough now to have opinions about the music.
Nineteen years later, we still take the whole thing down every April.Robbi Raitt, founder
The dates that matter
A note on the founding year. The club's existing pages give 2007 in three places and 2008 in one. We have used 2007 throughout — it matches the copyright line and the nineteen-years release — and the exact opening season is being confirmed from records.
Enquire
Tell us your dates and party size and a named concierge replies within one business day. If you would rather hear it from a member first, we can arrange that too.