Rick Caruso got the call on a Friday afternoon, at home in Newport Beach with his family. A broker told him Sherwood Lake Club might be available. He had never set foot on the property. By Tuesday, the paperwork was signed. That is the kind of pace usually reserved for distressed assets or once-in-a-decade opportunities, and inside the gates at Lake Sherwood, most residents didn't hear about the sale until weeks after it closed.
If you live here, you already know the broad strokes. The club that anchored Sherwood since David H. Murdock built the community changed hands earlier this year, and construction crews have been visible near the clubhouse for months. What's less understood, even by people who drive past the site every week, is what this ownership change actually does to the club itself, and to who gets to use it.
The short version: this isn't a renovation. It's a merger.
The Deal Nobody Behind the Gates Saw Coming
Murdock, the former Dole Food Co. chairman who built the fruit and vegetable company into a global operation, developed the Sherwood community from the ground up. His holdings included more than 650 homes across three gated neighborhoods, the championship-caliber Sherwood Country Club, and the separate Sherwood Lake Club, a members-only golf, tennis, and pool facility built around a rare 18-hole, par-3 course. Murdock died in June 2025 at age 102, and the Lake Club sat with an uncertain future until Caruso's company acquired it under an LLC in February 2026.
The course itself is the kind of detail worth pausing on before we get to the changes. Jack Nicklaus has designed only two 18-hole, par-3 courses in the world, and this is one of them. Caruso has publicly called it "a little jewel," and by every account so far, the layout is staying intact. The construction you're seeing isn't touching the fairways. It's happening at the clubhouse.
A Bigger Clubhouse Is Not the Same as a Renovated One
Here's where it gets interesting for anyone who has used the Lake Club as it existed under Murdock. The 18,000-square-foot clubhouse is being rebuilt to include an Italian-themed restaurant and bar, with the chef still unannounced. The gym is getting a full overhaul. A wellness center overlooking the golf course is being added. The pool, notably, is being relocated, not just resurfaced, specifically to open up more outdoor space. A poolside grill is going in for casual lunch service, and tennis programming continues alongside all of it.
Individually, those read like standard country club upgrades. Together, they describe something else: a facility built to hold more people, more often, doing more things on the property at once. A club designed for a quick round of golf and a shower has different bones than a club designed to be a full-day destination, and the second version needs more capacity everywhere, from parking to the dining room.
That distinction matters because of what Caruso has said about how the finished product will actually work.
"It's part of our ecosystem. Members of the Miramar Club, our beach club in Montecito, those members will also be able to use it. It's a fairly quick drive from Montecito to Sherwood."
That single quote, from Caruso's own account of the project, is the piece most coverage of the sale has treated as a footnote. It shouldn't be. The rebrand to Miramar Lake Club isn't cosmetic branding borrowed from his Rosewood Miramar Beach resort in Montecito. It's a literal statement that membership at one Caruso property now grants access to another, two counties apart.
Calabasas Enters the Picture
The ecosystem extends further than Montecito. Caruso's company has broken ground on an expansion at the Commons at Calabasas that includes more than 80 apartments in an eight-story luxury building. Premium units in that building will come with a membership bundled in, and per Caruso's own description of the plan, that membership plugs into the same network as Miramar Lake Club and the Montecito beach club.
Put plainly: someone who signs a lease in Calabasas this year could end up with pool and golf privileges at a club inside your gates, without ever having looked at a home in Lake Sherwood. That's a meaningfully different membership model than the one Murdock ran for decades, where access to the Lake Club tracked closely with actually living in the community.
None of this makes the renovation a bad thing for property values or for the neighborhood's standing. Caruso's track record with The Grove, The Americana at Brand, and Rosewood Miramar Beach suggests he builds for the long haul rather than a quick flip, and an elevated, professionally run private club is generally an asset to the homes around it. But an asset with a wider radius of access is a different asset than the one residents have relied on, and it's worth understanding the mechanism rather than just the marketing.
What Actually Changes at the Gate This Fall
A few practical things worth knowing if you live here:
- No official completion date has been announced publicly. A project tracking page lists a fall 2026 target, but permitting and environmental review could still shape the final scope and timeline.
- Early construction activity has been phased, which suggests the club is aiming to keep some operations running through the buildout rather than closing entirely.
- The restaurant concept is confirmed as Italian-themed with a bar, but the chef hasn't been named, so expect that detail to land closer to opening.
- The golf course itself, the actual Nicklaus par-3 layout, isn't part of the renovation scope described so far. If you're a member who plays regularly, the course you know should still be the course you get.
What isn't yet public: pricing for existing members under the new ownership, whether current membership terms carry over automatically, and how reservations or access will be prioritized once Montecito and Calabasas members are added to the rotation. Those are the questions worth asking directly if you hold a Lake Club membership, because they're the ones that determine whether "more open space" at the new pool actually translates into more room for you.
The Real Story Isn't the Pool
It's tempting to read this whole project as a straightforward glow-up: new restaurant, better gym, nicer pool deck. That's the version that's easy to photograph and easy to write about, and it's the version most of the coverage so far has settled for.
The more useful read is the one buried in Caruso's own words about ecosystem and drive time. Sherwood's club just became one stop on a three-property membership circuit that runs from the Central Coast to the western edge of the San Fernando Valley. That's not a criticism of the renovation. It's a fact about how private club membership is evolving in this part of Southern California, and it's the kind of shift that shows up gradually, in slightly fuller parking lots and slightly less familiar faces at the pool, long before anyone writes a headline about it.
If you've lived behind these gates for a while, you already have a sense for how the community feels on an ordinary Saturday. This fall is likely to be the first real test of whether that feeling holds once the new clubhouse opens its doors to a membership base that extends well past Sherwood's own boundary.
For homeowners weighing what any of this means for their own property, whether that's understanding how amenity changes tend to ripple through a gated community's resale conversations, or simply wanting a clearer read on where Lake Sherwood stands as these changes unfold, Tina Lucarelli has spent two decades working these exact streets and can walk you through what the Miramar transition is likely to mean for your specific corner of the community. Request a private consultation and complimentary home valuation to talk through it.
