Kevin Blum has invested over $1 million into the property since purchasing it last July, and the 10,000-sq. ft. clubhouse features several paintings for sale, with a “main attraction” piece depicting golf’s four majors and a history of the game in the works.
As part of a $1 million-plus renovation project that began when he purchased the course last July, Kevin Blum is turning Brierwood Golf Club’s 10,000-sq. ft. clubhouse into a mini art museum, Myrtle Beach, S.C.-based Sun News reported.
The South Brunswick, N.C., clubhouse already contains several paintings for sale, and its main attraction will be a 5-by-4-foot painting depicting Brierwood, golf’s four majors and a history of the game being done for the course by artist Tommy Davis, a co-owner of Collector’s Café and Gallery in Myrtle Beach, the Sun News reported.
“It’s mainly about the class of the place and to give it an upscale feel,” said Chris Sprow, Brierwood’s director of sales, marketing and real estate. “It’s also a networking thing and kind of a niche for us that sets us apart.”
The grand reopening of the Brierwood clubhouse and Charlie’s Grill is February 13 and includes a 5 p.m. ribbon-cutting followed by an evening of appetizers and hors d’oeuvres, signature cocktails and music by local musician Richard Hubbell, the Sun News reported.
“It’s nice to finally enjoy the fruits of our labor over the past six months, putting all this work in for the remodeling,” Sprow said. “It has been a complete remodel of the pro shop and restaurant. Pretty much everything is new.”
Blum, 31, was a real estate investor in Scottsdale, Ariz., last year and decided he wanted to make an investment on the Carolinas coast. He was looking for property in Charleston when he learned of Brierwood, a 6,650-yard course that opened in 1967. He bought the course and eight undeveloped lots around it. Sprow, a real estate broker also in his 30s who ran a pair of swanky nightclubs in Scottsdale, came with him and they share management duties, the Sun News reported.
“I just always thought it would be cool to own a golf course, I guess,” Blum said. “I needed a challenge and I was ready for a little change of pace and I wanted to live in the Carolinas, near the beach. It just kind of worked out perfectly.”
Blum and Sprow met Davis last June at the U.S. Open in Pinehurst, N.C., which they were all attending. Davis expects the golf masterpiece to be completed in early March. He already has four paintings in the clubhouse and will rotate others in. The initial idea was for the painting to be a mural down the hallway from the pro shop to the restaurant, but Davis thought a framed painting would better serve the club and Blum, the Sun News reported.
“I thought it would be better if it were on canvas, that way they can move it or take it with them, which makes it more valuable than having it on a wall,” Davis said.
The painting will have clubhouses representing the four pro majors in its four corners—Augusta National for the Masters, St. Andrews for the British Open, Pinehurst for the U.S. Open and the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island Resort for the PGA Championship. The Brierwood clubhouse will be in the top middle portion, with the lake it overlooks below it and containing the famed 12-foot alligator that inhabits it named Charlie, the Sun News reported.
Six golfers representing different eras in golf will move through the painting in a progressive swing sequence beginning with a full backswing and ending with a follow through. The golfers will be Charles Blair Macdonald from the 1890s, Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and one of today’s young stars, the Sun News reported.
Blum said artists from Brunswick County will also be placing some of their work in the clubhouse, the Sun News reported.
“We don’t want people to think they have to be golfers to come to the restaurant,” Blum said. “We’d like to have entertainment, especially from Memorial Day to Labor Day, at least have music, wine tastings, some type of gatherings.”
The restaurant, which is named after the gator, will be open for lunch and dinner seven days a week and feature what Sprow calls an “upscale casual” menu. In addition to hamburgers, hotdogs, wraps, gyros and wings, healthy offerings will include specialty salads. Blum, who attended a culinary institute, will hire a chef but has been overseeing the kitchen, the Sun News reported.
“We want to offer brain foods, not just fried food,” Sprow said. Blum plans theme nights for dinners to start, including prime rib, fish fries and tacos. The menu will also include seasonal local seafood specials, including clams casino for the opening, the Sun News reported.
Blum said he has spent nearly $1 million on renovations thus far and isn’t finished yet, and he’s doing it at a time when few course owners on the Strand are making major investments because of the struggling state of the golf industry. “It sounds crazy saying it, but the first million went really fast,” Blum said.
The three-level clubhouse has a new roof and new furniture, kitchen equipment, restaurant windows, bar and bar stools, draught beer system linked to a new walk-in cooler on the first floor, bar-like community table parallel to the bar, and paint on the entirety of the interior and exterior, the Sun News reported.
First-floor offices are being turned into a member’s lounge and game room with billiards, darts and poker table. Locker rooms have been eliminated and part of that area has been turned into a private dining area complete with a large dinner table, couch and TVs. A facility for weddings is being built adjacent to the clubhouse and lake, and Blum is considering building a pavilion on the other side of the clubhouse for wedding receptions and other events, the Sun News reported.
The large patio that overlooks the lake and parts of four holes has been rebuilt with new wood and HydroStop all-weather floor covering. The dining room and patio can seat approximately 150 people. A brand new fleet of Yamaha carts equipped with ball/club washers and coolers arrived last week, the Sun News reported.
On the course, the layout needs a good summer growing season and Blum plans to encourage it with aggressive agronomy practices, including fertilizer and aerating. Tree trimming is continuing and has opened up views of the course from the clubhouse and should improve grass health, and a cart path repair project is beginning this week. Several pieces of maintenance equipment have been purchased, as has an irrigation system from Ford Plantation in Georgia that will soon be installed, the Sun News reported.
Tee boxes will be redone, weeds are being attacked and a bunker on the 14th hole is being repaired. “It’s just deferred maintenance over the past X amount of years,” Sprow said.
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