Ask a golfer at Mira Vista what changed on the course over the last two years and they will talk for ten minutes about tee boxes, new green complexes, and how a couple of holes play longer now than they used to. Ask a neighbor who has never picked up a club, and most will say they heard something happened at the club but couldn't tell you what. Both are half right. Mira Vista Country Club just finished the most expensive project in its 39-year history, and almost none of that money went toward anything a non-golfer would ever notice. The one piece that did land outside the fairways is a lit putting green with a bar built into it, and it may end up mattering more to daily life inside the gates than the greens themselves.
The Renovation, in Plain Terms
In October 2024, the club broke ground on its first full rebuild since the course opened in 1987 under designers Jay Morrish and Tom Weiskopf. Golf course architect Andy Staples led the redesign, with Labar Golf Renovations handling construction. The scope covered new greens, new tees, reshaped fairways, a complete regrassing, and a full replacement of the irrigation and drainage systems running underneath the course. Native grasses were worked into the secondary rough and a number of trees came out to open up sightlines. The course reopened to members in October 2025.
The price tag depends on who you ask. The club's own planning materials from mid-2025 put the project at $20 million. When Golf Inc. magazine featured the work in its 2026 Renovation of the Year coverage, it listed the final cost at $21 million, a gap that likely reflects change orders on a project of this scope rather than any real disagreement about what got built.
Same Fairways, Different Greens
The strange part of a project this size is how little of it you'd catch on a drive-by. One Golf Digest course-ranking panelist noted that Staples' team reworked nearly every green surround, lengthened the course, incorporated native grasses into the secondary rough while leaving the routing largely intact. The fairways and tee corridors run where they always have. The par-71 layout still measures out to roughly 7,000 yards with a 143 slope. If you walked the cart path today without stopping, the course would look, from a distance, like the one you've always known.
Stop at any green, though, and it's a different hole. Reviewers describe far more undulation, more tiering, and more variety in how a green can be approached than the original design allowed. That's the trade-off of rebuilding a course wedged inside an existing housing community: you can't move the corridors without moving houses, so the entire improvement had to happen underground and at green level, where only golfers will ever feel it.
The One Hole Built for the View, Not Just the Score
There's one exception, and it sits at the very end of the round. On hole 18, the design team removed a land peninsula so water could run the full length of the left side of the hole. According to the project's own documentation, the change wasn't made to alter how the hole plays. It was made to create a more dramatic finish and a better view from both the tees and the clubhouse. That's a small but telling detail: for the first time on this course, a design decision was made explicitly for the people watching, not just the people playing. It's the same instinct that shows up, at a much bigger scale, in the amenity built next to it.
The Ridge: Mira Vista's First Amenity That Isn't About Golf
On the site of the old practice green, the renovation added something the club has never had before. It's called The Ridge, a 28,000-square-foot Himalayas-style putting course lit for night play, with an outdoor bar and built-in speakers designed to keep people around after the sun goes down. It isn't a place to shave strokes off a handicap. It's a place to show up on a Wednesday evening with no scorecard and no tee time, which is a different kind of invitation than anything this club has built in 39 years.
For a community where a large share of residents live inside the gates specifically because of the golf course, the interesting thing about The Ridge is who it's actually for. It doesn't require membership in the golf side of the club, doesn't require any real skill, and doesn't require setting aside four hours. It's the first piece of Mira Vista's golf infrastructure built for the people who never intended to play golf at all, and that's a meaningfully different amenity than "we redid the greens."
Alongside the golf work, the club's broader amenity base rounds out what daily life inside the gates draws on:
- A 44,000-square-foot clubhouse
- Six outdoor and two indoor tennis courts
- Six outdoor pickleball courts
- A resort-style pool and updated fitness centers
None of that changed in this renovation. The Ridge is the one genuinely new thing to walk over to.
The First Real Test Was a Golf Tournament for Cancer Care
The renovated course got its first high-profile outing this spring, and it wasn't a member event. On April 13, 2026, the JPS Foundation held its inaugural JPS Golf Classic at Mira Vista, a charity tournament supporting oncology programs at JPS Health Network. Organizers billed it as one of the first opportunities to play the course following its extensive renovation, with room for up to 120 players.
That matters for a reason beyond the golf. An outside charity choosing a freshly renovated private course for its debut tournament is a signal that the club is considered ready to host at scale again, and it's unlikely to be the only outside event on the 2026 calendar. For residents, that means more gate traffic, more guest lists, and more event days worth planning around than the club has had in the two years the course was under construction.
Why a Member-Owned Club Spent Like This
Mira Vista Country Club became member-owned in 2008, which is worth remembering when you look at where the money went. This wasn't an outside operator maximizing green fees or building an amenity to flip the property. It was a decision made by the people who already live behind the gates to spend most of the budget on infrastructure they will personally never see, in exchange for a course that plays better and a hillside hangout that didn't exist before. That's a different kind of investment than most private clubs make, and it tracks with a community that's spent decades building around a single shared amenity rather than a rotating cast of outside members.
The headline version of this story is "Mira Vista Country Club finished a $20 million course renovation." The version that actually changes a Tuesday night here is that, for the first time, there's somewhere to go that has nothing to do with your handicap.
If you're curious what else has shifted inside the gates lately, our Mira Vista neighborhood guide and our look at a day in the life inside Mira Vista cover more of the everyday texture of living here. And if the day ever comes when you're thinking about a move in or out of Mira Vista, John Zimmerman Group knows this neighborhood down to the greens. Work With Us whenever you're ready.
