"It will make it more functional and inviting, and aligns with the Desert Highlands brand and quality expected at the club today and into the future." That's Desi Speh, the club's Chief Operating Officer and General Manager, describing the $3.5 million renovation now underway in the men's locker room. It sounds like a routine capital project announcement. It isn't. It's the third and final piece of a rebuild that started on the golf course two years ago, and the order the club chose to do it in tells you more about how Desert Highlands operates than any single project does on its own.
The Course Came First, and the Reason Matters
Desert Highlands closed its Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course for restoration in the spring of 2025 and reopened it that November, after a $9.8 million project led by Nicklaus Design senior designer Chad Goetz and the club's own Director of Agronomy, Cody Horstman. The stated goal wasn't to modernize the course into something new. It was to return it to the architectural intent Nicklaus laid out in 1983, before decades of incremental changes softened it.
That distinction shows up in the specifics. Greens were rebuilt roughly 26 percent larger and converted from Bermuda grass back to Bentgrass, the surface the course originally played on. A land peninsula was removed from the 18th hole so water now runs the full length of the left side, a change made for the view from the tees and clubhouse rather than for how the hole plays. Crews thinned about 50 acres of overgrown desert vegetation to reopen sightlines the original design intended, then revegetated roughly 15 acres with 80 new saguaros and about 6,000 native plants. Behind the 18th green, a new 28,000-square-foot putting course called The Ridge, lit at night with an outdoor bar built in, took the place of the old practice greens.
Golf Inc. Magazine named the project its 2026 Renovation of the Year in the Private Club category, ahead of Mira Vista Country Club in Texas, the Landings Golf and Athletic Club in Georgia, and Stones River Country Club in Tennessee, which received honorable mention. The judges' language matters here too: the panel praised the project for returning the course to its original vision while quietly modernizing the irrigation, drainage, and turf systems underneath it. That's the pattern the club would repeat indoors.
Then the Clubhouse, in Two Phases
With the course finished, Desert Highlands turned to the lower clubhouse. Phase one, a $2.5 million modernization of the golf shop and women's locker room, is already complete. The pro shop got a redesigned layout with an expanded entrance and a relocated retail counter. The women's locker room came out the other side with brighter finishes, a refreshed card lounge, upgraded vanity and wet areas, and a self-serve comfort station stocked with snack drawers, grab-and-go lunch options, wine on tap, and a Pour-My-Beer system.
Phase two is the men's locker room work Speh described, and it carries a larger budget: $3.5 million, aimed at a finish by the end of 2026. The plans call for vanity areas finished in leathered granite with mixed brass and matte-black fixtures, and a new fireside gathering space named the Nicklaus Room. Joan Sykora, the club's Chief Brand and Experience Officer, has described it as phase two of the lower clubhouse project, a label that only makes sense if you already know there was a phase one. Most members watching the construction fencing go up this year probably don't.
One Team, Same Signature
The continuity across all three projects is easy to miss if you only notice the one closest to you. PHX Architecture and Hatch Design Group designed the golf shop and women's locker room. The same two firms are leading the men's locker room now. They're also the team behind Jack's, the gastropub inside the clubhouse named for Nicklaus, and Jack's Backyard, the outdoor lounge with fireside seating and two bocce courts that looks out toward Pinnacle Peak. Ventana, the club's more formal dining room, got its own update in the same stretch, with larger windows and an open floor plan designed to bring more of the desert view inside.
None of this is being built to serve an outside membership base looking for a country club to join. Desert Highlands reports 563 memberships, and every one of them is tied to homeownership in the community. There's no separate golf-only membership tier absorbing part of the cost. The $15.8 million spent across the course restoration and both clubhouse phases is being carried entirely by the people who already own homes there, which is a different proposition than a resort or a semi-private club spreading capital costs across a larger and more transient membership pool.
Visible From the Trail
Pinnacle Peak Trail runs along the edge of the community, and from its higher sections hikers get a clear look down at the fairways below, along with the neighboring courses at Estancia, Troon, and the Four Seasons Resort. The trail itself is unrelated to any of this construction. But the desert thinning and revegetation work done as part of the golf course restoration changed what's visible from up there. Fewer overgrown obstacles between the fairways and the surrounding desert means longer, cleaner sightlines from the trail down onto the course than existed before the 2025 restoration, whether or not the hiker looking down knows why.
By the time the granite goes into the Nicklaus Room, Desert Highlands will have spent close to two years rebuilding itself in a specific direction: course first, at $9.8 million, to restore what Nicklaus originally drew in 1983, then the clubhouse in two funded phases, using the same design firms throughout, to bring the buildings up to the same standard as the ground they sit on. It's not a series of unrelated capital projects that happened to land in the same stretch of years. It's one plan, executed in an order that put the golf course ahead of the rooms members actually eat and change clothes in.
If you're tracking what's changing inside Desert Highlands, or comparing it to the pace of investment at other North Scottsdale golf communities, the team at Power+ follows these clubs closely as part of covering the wider foothill corridor around Desert Mountain. Reach out if you'd like the context behind any renovation, listing, or club change in the neighborhoods we cover.
