Meadow Club

Alister MacKenzie designed Meadow Club in 1927 on a piece of Fairfax, California Marin County land north of San Francisco — the architect's first American work, completed before he routed Cypress Point and before he began the collaborations with Bobby Jones that would produce Augusta National. The site sits in a natural meadow between the Marin coastal hills, and MacKenzie routed the eighteen holes through the property's gentle elevation changes with the natural creek corridors as architectural framework. Meadow Club is the most-preserved early-MacKenzie American routing — the membership has resisted significant redesign through generations, and the modern course retains substantial fidelity to MacKenzie's 1927 routing.

The course plays around 6,562 yards par 72 from the back markers, with bent fairways and a slope in the upper 130s. The yardage is short by modern championship standards, but the routing's defense is the green complexes — small, severely contoured, with the angled approach corridors that MacKenzie established as his signature throughout this stretch of his career. The third hole is a 218-yard par-3 across a natural depression; the seventh, a 416-yard par-4 with a green set behind a natural creek crossing, is the routing's most-discussed mid-round hole. The fairways play firm given the Marin clay subsoil that drains quickly after winter rain.

Meadow Club is private and access is members and accompanied guests only. The membership is small — historically around four hundred — and the hospitality model is traditional country club. The club has stayed outside the destination-private trend, and the MacKenzie architectural pedigree is the primary institutional identity rather than tournament-rotation prestige.

Marin County climate keeps Meadow Club playable year-round, with the firmest conditions in September and October. The summer marine layer rolls in from the Pacific most mornings and clears by late morning. The afternoon breeze gives the routing reliable daily wind. The course closes briefly through winter storms but otherwise operates continuously. The natural creek corridor through the property turns golden in late summer, and the Marin coastal-hill setting gives the routing visual signature distinct from MacKenzie's later California work.