Ask a member how the club renovation is going and most will point you toward the new pickleball courts. Fair enough. They're finished, they're busy most evenings, and the grand opening back in March gave people something to actually see and use. What that answer misses is that the courts were the easy part. The piece of CCL Forward that will actually change how this neighborhood sounds, moves, and plays golf hasn't started yet. It starts in November, on the fairways themselves, and it runs for close to a year.
The part you can already play
Country Club of Louisiana's own construction page lays out the plan as two phases rather than one long project, and that distinction matters more than it looks. Phase One, running October 2025 through July 2026, covers the pickleball courts and the new Par 3 short course, short game area, driving range, and greens nursery. The pickleball build finished first. Construction on the courts wrapped and the grand opening landed on a Thursday in late March, giving members a finished amenity to enjoy while the rest of the property stayed under scaffolding and silt fence.
That sequencing wasn't an accident. Pickleball is cheap to build and fast to finish relative to reshaping turf, and the club's own materials frame it as a low-cost way to keep the property busy while the bigger, slower work gets underway elsewhere. If you've walked past the courts on a weeknight and noticed how full they already are, that's the intended effect.
The quiet second half of Phase One
The Par 3 short course broke ground in March, which means as of this writing it's been under construction for roughly five months. The club's stated Phase One window closes at the end of July, a date that has already come and gone by the time you're reading this. That gap between the printed timeline and the actual calendar is worth noticing. It doesn't mean anything has gone wrong. Short course work, practice green grow-in, and driving range regrading are the kind of construction that tends to run a few weeks past its target once you factor in Louisiana's summer heat and the time turf needs to establish before it can take foot traffic. If the roped-off area near the range still looks unfinished into late summer, that's consistent with how this type of build usually plays out, not a sign the project has stalled.
What this means day to day: the main 18 holes have stayed open and playable through all of Phase One. The disruption so far has been contained to the practice facilities, not the course itself. That's about to change.
What November actually changes
Phase Two starts in November 2026 and runs through September 2027, and its scope is different in kind, not just size. Where Phase One added amenities around the edges of the property, Phase Two is golf course and putting green construction, meaning the playing surfaces themselves get rebuilt. That's roughly ten months of work on the actual fairways and greens that make up the round, not the driving range next to them.
The club describes this piece of the plan as necessary because of the course's age and the need for modernization, which lines up with the numbers. This is a Jack Nicklaus design that opened in the mid-1980s. The greenside bunkers were rebuilt in 2007. The course and practice green went through renovation in the summer of 2012. The driving range, cart paths, and short game facility were redone again in 2018. Phase Two of CCL Forward is the first time since 2012 that the actual routing and playing surfaces are getting comprehensive work, and it's happening on a course that, by the club's own account, has been ranked among the top two in Louisiana every year since 2014.
For anyone whose home borders a fairway or who's used to riding a cart to dinner after nine holes, November is the date to actually plan around. Expect holes to close in sequence rather than all at once, based on how construction crews typically stage this kind of rebuild, though the club hasn't published a hole-by-hole schedule yet.
This isn't CCL's first rebuild, and that's the point
Members who've been here since before the pandemic will remember the last time the club asked everyone to live through a construction zone. In 2018, membership voted in favor of an $8.5 million renovation covering the clubhouse, restaurants, and the tennis and fitness facilities. The club brought in Chambers, a national design firm that specializes in private club renovations, and the project took twelve to eighteen months from vote to ribbon cutting.
"It's really about transforming CCLA to meet the expectations and desires of both the current and future membership," said Jay Bruno, who was CCLA's board president at the time. "We want to maximize member enjoyment in 2018 but also for the decades to come."
That project delivered the moveable glass NanaWall linking indoor and outdoor dining, a couples-only bar and grill, and the fitness center by the pool with its upper-level tennis-viewing terrace, the version of the clubhouse most current members already know as simply how it's always been. The pattern holds: the club renovates in stages, funds it through member vote, and treats each phase as buying member enjoyment for the next decade rather than the next season. CCL Forward is that same playbook applied to the golf course instead of the clubhouse, and it's the first time in fourteen years that playbook has touched the fairways directly.
What to actually expect between now and next fall
- Right now through the end of summer: the driving range, short game area, and greens nursery stay fenced while turf establishes. The 18 holes remain open.
- This fall: pickleball leagues and open play settle into a normal rhythm on the finished courts, and the short course likely opens for casual use as grow-in finishes.
- November: Phase Two begins. Golf course and putting green construction starts, and this is when fairway-adjacent noise, equipment traffic, and hole closures become part of daily life here rather than something happening near the edges of the property.
- Through September 2027: expect a rolling closure pattern rather than a single long shutdown, consistent with how the club staged its 2018 clubhouse project and its 2012 course renovation.
Why the distinction matters if you live here
None of this changes the fundamentals of what makes Country Club of Louisiana what it is: the gated privacy, the oak-lined streets, the golf-cart access to a clubhouse most members already know intimately. What it does change, for the next year, is the rhythm of using the club itself. Knowing that Phase One's disruption was mostly cosmetic, contained to practice areas most residents don't cross daily, while Phase Two reaches the fairways that back up to actual homes, is the difference between being surprised by construction noise in December and having already planned your winter rounds around it.
If you're weighing what a season of course construction means for your own plans here, whether that's timing a home sale around the disruption or simply deciding when to invite out-of-town guests for a round, Del Rio Real Estate has spent years watching how Baton Rouge's gated communities move through projects exactly like this one. Schedule a private consultation and we'll walk through what the next phase actually means for your corner of the club.
