Ravisloe Country Club

History

South of Chicago, in the town of Homewood, Ravisloe Country Club emerged as one of the many private clubs that took root in the region during the golden age of American golf course construction. The club drew on the growing appetite among Chicago’s business and professional class for a retreat from the city — a place where members could gather for golf, socializing, and the rituals of country club life that were becoming fixtures of suburban America in the early twentieth century.

The course bears the design work of Donald Ross, the Scottish-born architect whose name appears on the roster of more American golf courses than perhaps any other figure of his era. Ross built his reputation on an ability to read a piece of ground and let its natural contours dictate the routing, rather than imposing an artificial vision upon it. At Ravisloe, his hand brought the same disciplined eye he applied from Pinehurst to countless other clubs across the Midwest and East Coast — a body of work built one commission at a time, club by club, as American golf expanded outward from its Eastern seaboard origins into towns like Homewood.

Over the decades since its founding, Ravisloe has remained a fixture of the Chicago-area private club scene, its Ross pedigree a point of pride among members and golf historians who track the architect’s surviving designs. As with many clubs of its vintage, the passage of time has brought maintenance work and course adjustments consistent with keeping a century-old layout in playable condition, though the essential character of Ross’s routing has endured as the club’s defining inheritance.