What's Actually Being Built Behind the Fence at Colonial Country Club?

If you've walked or driven along Colonial Parkway or Country Club Circle in the past year, you've seen the fencing move. It goes up around one section, comes down somewhere else, and a new stretch of orange mesh appears where you swore there was nothing last month. Ask a member what's happening and you'll usually get one answer: "the clubhouse renovation." That answer is true, but it's also incomplete. What's actually going on behind that fence is four separate construction projects, filed under four separate permits, built by four separate teams, each running on its own clock. Two of them are supposed to cross their finish line this fall, which means the next eight weeks matter more to this stretch of the neighborhood than the last two years combined.

Colonial Country Club sits along the south bank of the Clear Fork of the Trinity River, just northwest of the TCU campus, which is why so much of the neighborhood's daily traffic touches some stretch of its perimeter without anyone actually walking through the gates. You don't have to be a member to notice the cranes.

Since 1953, Not Since Last Spring

The club's own materials frame the current work in stark terms: this is the first major clubhouse renovation and expansion since the original building burned down in 1953. That fire destroyed the kitchen and severely damaged the structure. Founder Marvin Leonard had meals delivered to the grounds so members could keep their Sunday brunch tradition going on the front lawn, and the club still hosted its PGA Tour event a month later under a tent, with Ben Hogan winning that year. The rebuilt clubhouse didn't reopen for nearly two years.

Leonard had a line he used with the people running his various ventures, Colonial included, that the club still quotes today.

"It's not good enough to be better than the competition, you must be better and different."

That's the standard the current project is measured against. Membership approved a $75 million campus renovation in 2022. Trade press covering the private club industry has since described the fuller scope as a $100 million master plan, a figure that reflects how much the project has grown since that original vote, not a change in what members actually authorized. Either number puts this rebuild in a different category than anything the club has done since the tent-and-brunch era of the 1950s.

Four Contracts, Four Clocks

Here's what's actually permitted, filed, and moving right now.

The golf course is the piece everyone already watched finish. Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner rebuilt it to reflect the club's own 1941 U.S. Open design intent, and they did it fast enough to have the course ready for the 2024 Colonial. That project is done. If you've golfed there or watched the tournament since, you've already seen the result.

The guard house is the project nobody talks about, and for good reason. Ninety-four square feet and a construction value of roughly $50,000 doesn't compete for attention with a clubhouse addition ten times its size. But it was filed under the same architect of record, Architexas, that's now handling the much larger clubhouse work, which tells you the club is running this as one coordinated plan rather than a series of unrelated fixes. Its target completion date, January 1, 2026, has already passed. If the schedule held, it's been standing at the entrance for months.

The tennis pavilion is the one worth watching right now, because its target window is summer, and today is still summer. The project adds roughly 24,100 square feet of indoor space built onto the existing tennis building, giving members a four-season home for a sport that until now lived entirely outdoors, three indoor and ten outdoor tennis courts plus eight pickleball courts. Two Fort Worth firms, 97w Architects and Hasen Design Build, are behind it. If the summer 2026 target holds, this is the project most likely to be wrapping up the same week you're reading this.

The Clubhouse Has Two Finish Lines

The clubhouse is where the numbers get more interesting, because there are two of them, and they don't describe the same thing.

The city permit for the remodel, the part covering the existing 56,243-square-foot building's kitchen, locker rooms, café, offices, fitness center, and exterior windows and doors, lists an estimated cost of $12 million and a completion target of November 1, 2026. That date is a little under seven weeks from now.

The club's interior design partner, Thiel & Team, describes something broader: a $20 million transformation of the full 68,000-plus-square-foot clubhouse, timed to align with the 2026 Charles Schwab Challenge. That tournament ran May 25 through 31 this year, months before the permit's own November completion date. Anyone who walked the grounds for tournament week this spring was looking at a clubhouse that was still, by its own paperwork, five months from finished.

The bigger figure includes the new North Building, a three-level, 27,900-square-foot addition connected to the original clubhouse by a history hallway. That hallway is meant to house a Hogan Memorabilia Room with a custom trophy case, tying the new construction back to the Ben Hogan connection that's shaped Colonial's identity for eighty years. The addition itself holds three new dining venues, the golf pro shop, and administrative offices. Trade coverage of the broader master plan has also described a 500-seat ballroom, a spa, a barbershop, and a remodeled kitchen with the bakery relocated to better serve a planned café.

So if you're trying to figure out when the club's biggest project actually opens, the answer isn't May. It's fall, and specifically, it's whenever the permitted November 1 date proves accurate or slips.

What's Still Just a Drawing

Not everything in the master plan has a permit number yet. Trade press covering the club's longer-term vision has described two more pieces still under design:

• Camp Colonial, a planned family and aquatics complex with a cinema room, a gaming room, and a casual-themed restaurant
• A separate indoor racquets facility for tennis, pickleball, and padel

Neither has a construction start date. Until one shows up in the permit record, treat these as intent rather than a timeline.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

The fencing you've been driving past isn't one long project with one grand opening. It's four builds on four schedules, two of which are hitting their own stated finish lines this season, one of which finished two years ago, and one of which won't have a real opening until after most people assume it already happened. If you're the kind of resident who wants to actually track it, the tennis pavilion is your best bet for visible progress in the next few weeks, and the clubhouse's real debut is a November story, not a springtime one.

That kind of detail, knowing which fence belongs to which finish line, is the sort of thing you only get by paying attention to a neighborhood over years rather than reading it off a listing sheet. It's also the kind of groundwork the John Zimmerman Group has been doing across Colonial/TCU and the rest of central Fort Worth for a long time. If you want the same level of detail applied to a home you're already living in, or one you're weighing a move toward, Work With Us.