Portsea Golf Club now stands out from the crowd on victoria’s mornington peninsula thanks to an ambitious but educated decision to secure the club’s future.

The Club House

Seven years ago, prestigious Portsea Golf Club faced a decision that confronts many clubs in a golfing climate where consolidation is foremost in mind.

A very good – even exceptional – golf course, a wonderful natural asset on its own, was not enough to ensure the club’s long-term sustainability. So with room to spare, the club sought to sell off 21 lots of land (averaging 18 x 91 metres, at a lot average of $1.25 million) to fund a new $12 million clubhouse, restaurant and modern accommodation as a fully integrated entity. Not your average clubhouse, though. This grand structure would include 24 rooms impressive enough to attract the attention of Accor and become branded under the Mercure name.

The end result is a beautiful, functional and attractive, two-storey clubhouse located on a superior portion of the property, yet the path traversed to reach the final result belies the outcome. Firstly, the 830 members had to be won over, with at least a 70 percent majority. Secondly, a hotel brand of significance needed to see the benefits in aligning with a golf club – not a conventional coupling in the hospitality world. Thirdly, it all had to work. And that’s ‘work’ in an intangible sense – satisfying the co-operative and occasionally competing needs of members, landowners, administrators and visitors. Not an easy blend for whom to decipher the right recipe.