As the Hill turns

Once destined to redefine New England’s notion of a country club, Turner Hill has endured far more ebb than flow. After a members group bought the club this spring, questions linger. What went wrong, and where does it go from here?

By Jeremy Gottlieb

Television’s serial drama Lost draws about 20 million viewers per week, but few folks among the hit show’s demographic would dispute the suggestion that its plotlines trend cumbersome and convoluted. By comparison, the story of Turner Hill’s first decade makes Wednesday nights on ABC seem as undisguised and accessible as an after-school special.

Turner Hill Golf Club

If we put aside the allegory of contrasting Turner Hill’s saga with a tale of disaster survivors stranded on an uncharted island, assessing the uncertain future of what was born a can’t-miss golf and leisure community requires lenses thicker than a Coke bottle. And, for the stakeholders, skin thicker than a rhino’s.

The narrative history of Turner Hill’s irrefutable promise is well known. An Ipswich native, Ted Raymond, who made his fortune as an award-winning restoration and adaptive-use real estate developer, buys an unparalleled hometown property that enchanted him as a boy. The plan? To sculpt a 19th century gentleman’s farm estate, once owned by Boston’s Charles Goodnough Rice, into a modern-day Oz for the 21st century leisure class. A five-star, member-only, mixed-use recreation and residential community anchored by a championship, 7,000-yard golf course.

The question was never if Turner Hill would be a triumph of developmental and marketing genius. At issue was how fierce the mortal combat for one of 300 or so memberships might become.

The prototypical cynic (Lost devotees: think Sawyer) would suggest that none of Turner Hill’s current woes – take your pick from underfunded, undersold, underdeveloped or underachieving – are the least bit surprising. The cynic would say that little else could be expected from a developer, Raymond, who was undertaking his first suburban project, whose game of choice is polo, not golf, and whose vision of the club’s “target member” became a moving target.

Developmentally adrift for a decade, the club is now in the hands of a new members-owner group that bought the golf facility and the adjacent Rice mansion this spring.

“I don’t agree that the vision was flawed,” says Damon DeVito, managing director for Virginia-based Affinity Golf Management, which now owns and operates the Ferncroft Country Club in Middleton. “But it’s so crucial to establish clear positioning in the marketplace and momentum, and they’ve struggled with that at Turner Hill. Mistakes were made.”

Mistakes cut deep when you’re playing on the margin. But surely, mistakes made atop a mountain of gold are more forgiving. And Turner Hill had the look of a sacred cash cow from the start – a June day in 1997 when Raymond’s firm bought it from the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette for $4.5 million.

Raymond isn’t the first guy to pilot a burgeoning golf community too close to the shoals. Turner Hill is one of three clubs in a 60-mile radius – a tenuous trio rounded out by New Hampshire’s Golf Club of New England in Stratham and Haverhill’s Renaissance Golf Club – that have flirted with financial ruin in recent years. In March, Renaissance was repossessed by its mortgage company and designated for sale at auction after owners defaulted on its loan. The Palmer-designed Golf Course of New England filed for bankruptcy in 2004. Just a 15-minute drive down the road, the Ipswich Country Club endured enormous financial hardship during the early 1990s before rebounding.

Exploring the forces that combined to cloud Turner Hill’s position in the market and destroy its momentum is a prerequisite to gazing into the project’s future. Mistakes were made. There were planning, permitting and construction delays, cost overruns and financing missteps.

“The vision was fantastic and the intentions were great, but things got sidetracked,” says Jim O’Neil, one of 92 members who bought in to the new ownership group. “In hindsight, it’s easy to say this or that should have been done. I guess the most disappointing thing was the broken promises.”

Myopic to a fault
Polo and golf should consort famously, but in one of life’s trivial incongruities, the two pastimes are more like in-laws. The notion that a polo player from the Myopia Hunt Club followed a shortsighted action plan in the initial stages of Turner Hill’s development is an irony surely not lost on grip-and-rip diehards.

Back in 1997, given such an extraordinary blank canvas, it was inconceivable that Turner Hill Preservation Associates, LLC, Raymond’s legal-incorporation vehicle for the project, would fail to paint an instant masterpiece.

The original estate comprised about 700 acres when purchased as a single parcel from several adjacent landowners by Charles and Anne Rice in the 1890s. The grounds included 14 buildings – garages, barns, stables and dwellings for the butler, coachman and gardener, among others – before the addition of a mock-renaissance mansion.

Commissioned in 1898 and designed by architect William Rantoul (perhaps best known for producing Boston’s Shreve, Crump & Low Building) in the Edwardian Scottish-style, the property’s centerpiece was completed in 1903. There were multiple recreational trappings, including tennis courts, a ski hill, swimming, skating and swan ponds along with bridle paths and riding routes.

Just six days before Germany surrendered to Allied forces in May of 1945, the Hartford-based Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette purchased a 311-acre portion of the plot, 500 feet from the Ipswich River on the northerly side of Topsfield Road, which comprises the footprint of the present property. The Order retrofitted the mansion to incorporate a small chapel and living quarters for priests and brothers in addition to building several new structures, including the La Salette Shrine for religious services, which later became a regular venue for local concert performances.

Located 28 miles from Boston off Topsfield Road in the southwest corner of Ipswich, about three miles from both routes 1 and 1A, Turner Hill is a time capsule of a bygone era. A rustic, tree-lined lane winds the slope to Turner Hill’s outdoor foyer, the Grand Allee, a manicured garden boulevard flowing toward the mansion and the new residence community. Defined by rolling New England hills and woodlands, the property is at the epicenter of 10,000 acres of Willowdale State Forest, Bradley Palmer State Park and privately owned open space.

Topographically, site elevations range from 30 to 270 feet above mean sea level; gentle slopes cascade to a central wetland area between the property’s east and west high points. The view from the Hill is listed as a “noteworthy scenic landscape” by the Massachusetts Landscape Inventory at the state Department of Environmental Management, which is bureaucratic nomenclature for “breathtaking.”

“That remains one of the nicest properties I’ve ever seen,” says Neal Vohr, who was named President of Turner Hill before the project even broke ground until leaving to become General Manager of Wyoming’s Snake River Sporting Club during the 2005 golf season.

At a price tag of $120 million, Raymond promised a world-class, mixed-use development including a championship 18-hole golf course and accessory facilities, a passive outdoor recreation trail system, 182 residential units and a 100-room hotel – all with five-star service and amenities. The original plan called for two international squash courts and a doubles squash court, two indoor tennis courts as well as six outdoor courts, two paddle tennis courts and a full-service health spa (whirlpool, massage, fitness and aerobics facilities) along with a racquet-sports pro shop.

But the promises were never realized. For many reasons. When Raymond bought the property, golf-oriented residential communities had been booming in the Sun Belt for a half-decade or more, but there was white space in the New England market and golf was dizzyingly popular. That commanding position disintegrated in a hurry. A protracted four-year permitting process was punctuated by the 9-11 terrorist attacks, followed by a dip in the golf craze, a glut of 18-hole courses in the region and, finally, a housing downturn.

Consequently, Turner Hill went on the block last year with just 11 percent of its residences sold, while contemporary communities like Hingham’s Black Rock Country Club and Plymouth’s Pinehills Golf Club are 54- and 37-percent sold, respectively. There are cold, hard bad business decisions behind that disparity.

Stumbling out of the gate
“What went wrong? Number 1, it was a very poor business plan,” says Vohr, who came to Turner Hill in 2002 after nearly two decades at the New York Racquet and Tennis Club. “In this business, you have to have a capital partner – a legitimate lender. Selling memberships at $100,000 or $150,000 isn’t going to generate enough momentum to get it done.

“No venture of this size doesn’t experience a deficit before it turns a profit,” adds Vohr. “If you don’t demonstrate financial stability from the start, trying to get it done via the sale of memberships is intractable. To get 120 members at Turner Hill given that it was in trouble from the start is a testament to how amazing that facility really is.”

Truth be told, Turner Hill’s membership had eroded to 105 at the time of the recent sale, in which 92 members elected to buy a stake. Like the dozen or so disheartened defectors before them, most of those 13 who chose not to unsheathe their checkbook yet again on behalf of the project had plenty of reasons to hang their golf cap on. This past September, Raymond told the Boston Globe that the club had sold 147 memberships for $75,000 to $117,500. It’s precisely that kind of fuzzy math that, by 2003, made charter members’ blood pressure spike every time they heard their future club’s name. From the start, Turner Hill’s membership fee seemed more like a price tag at a Cairo bazaar than a gate key to paradise; some early members were poised to plunk down $150,000 before the price of admission began fluctuating like commodity futures.

“All we worry about is making our members look like geniuses,” says Affinity’s DeVito. “If you have to go back on price, you make early members revisit their decision and you kill your momentum. In this business, you can’t over-promise. All you have is 300 customers. They won’t all love you, but they have to respect you.”

More to the point, you must occasionally throw a bone to their faith in the venture. The project’s protracted permitting process meant properties didn’t begin selling until 2003. Raymond’s first-mover’s advantage was riper than week-old bananas. Out of the gate, Raymond projected 250 members and most residential units sold by 2006. For the record, 16 of 30 single-family homes approved for construction have been completed; a total of 21 have been sold at a starting price of $1.25 million. Four of the 50 to 60 townhouse cottages allowed by permit – for sale starting in the mid-$700,000s (mid-$800,000s for fairway frontage) – have been built, while the apartments and condos factored into the design plans remain a set of blueprints.

“The people who’ve bought in recognized the long-term value and aesthetics and chose to be the pioneers,” says Steve Archer, owner of Keller Williams Realty, who is still showing properties at Turner Hill. “It was quite an experience, though.”

By the end of 2005, with only a third of his desired membership, 60 percent of the residential real estate not built and almost 90 percent of it unsold, Raymond’s debt structure was untenable.

The Boston Globe reported last fall that he still owed more than $15 million on two notes associated with the property that totaled just under $20 million. By way of comparison, in a deal much more typical of his resume, Raymond bought Boston’s Government Center Garage at One Congress Street for $243 million this winter, a site that could be worth twice that or more as a residential, office or retail redevelopment project.

Raymond himself admits that his company’s venture into a new market was an immediate handicap in his attempt to realize Turner Hill’s ultimate goal.

“We suffered through the mistakes of not having direct experience in that type of development, which is a fairly unique type of development,” Raymond explains. “We also didn’t have the proper structure internally. It was a lengthy process, but it is, nonetheless, something we’re certainly proud of and it’s really poised to project the vision we all had from the beginning.”

Bad money after good
For some, the last straw arrived in 2004, when Raymond sought to bolster the golf club’s financial fitness profile by securing a seat-squirming high-interest loan. By then, if you ask Vohr, momentum had flat lined. Having prioritized the golf course and a lavish clubhouse/pro shop – for which construction costs ran into the double-digit millions – Raymond’s management team, to use a term from journalism, buried the lede.

“Everybody knows you’ve got to develop the community first and build the golf course around it, which then enhances the property values,” says Vohr. “You’ve got to be moving properties at $400,000, $500,000 or $600,000 apiece. Then, you use your course-membership sales to sustain your operations costs. Trying to develop the facilities separately, as they did, well, no one does that anymore.”

“For a project that enticing, there are 50 guys who will sign on at any price,” echoes DeVito. “A lot of developers don’t understand that rule, which we’ve learned to live by. It’s what happens after the first 50 that matters. You can’t keep telling people, ‘It’ll be great when.’ People are giving you money for what you have today. At Turner Hill, they couldn’t convert charter members into the next category of members. The message and mission didn’t translate in a credible way to the next group of people.”

Stack up all the project’s missteps, misgivings and luckless karma to date and, taken together, they might not be the equal of one singularly bad call. Raymond’s decision to table the rehab and exploitation of the Rice mansion was basically his Bill Buckner moment. “I joined to see that mansion rebuilt, and it just didn’t happen,” says member-owner O’Neil.

Yes, the overall design concept of development at Turner Hill was tasteful from the get-go, governed by the desire to create a traditional village density that defers to the surrounding landscape to preserve the original property’s stateliness. Fully 217 acres remains protected as green space. But the mansion is the magnum opus. Boasting hand-molded plaster ceilings, evocative wall friezes, oak floors and hand-carved woodwork, the structure is the property’s Tara. The reception hall’s wildlife motifs and windows were modeled after Haddington Hall in Scotland. In the basement, there’s a vintage two-lane bowling alley that simply begs for a bar, a butler and billiards room.

“History sells, renovation and restoration are important, entertainment is important,” says DeVito. “You walk through that mansion and it’s a blow-away experience. It’s like, ‘Wow, I’d love to have a scotch in this nook. I’d love to have a business meeting in this room. I’d love to have a wedding in this hall.’ You’ve got to focus on your demographic and not worry about the other guys. Are you going to argue that Turner Hill’s golf course is more championship than Salem or Myopia? Not credibly.

“The target customer there isn’t playing 60 rounds a year with a single-digit handicap,” he continues. “They want it plush, they don’t want a crowd up there and they want special services. Family, food, fun and the spa need to be a big deal up there. They can do things with that facility that other people can’t do and don’t want to do. The golf is just one component of that.”

The rising
If separating Turner Hill’s golf club and operations from its residential development plans was a poison pill for the project, the new member-owners’ purchase of the club and mansion as an independent entity is, paradoxically enough, a likely antidote.

There is now unprecedented financial stability within the golf club revenue stream of the project in the wake of the deal. A much more manageable debt of $4 million dollars is the amount member-owners undertook upon closing. Under the terms of the sale, payments on additional debts incurred before the club’s purchase by member-owners carry no interest, no timetable for repayment and no binding guarantee of repayment.

The total purchase price for the club and mansion was $16 million. Raymond rejected a bid of $31 million this winter by a resort company for the entire property and its residential development rights before deciding to sell the golf club and mansion separately.

“I think it’s a no-fail project now,” says Turner Hill’s new Director of Instruction, Webb Heintzelman, formerly the head pro at North Reading’s Thompson Country Club. “This is way too nice a property with way too nice a golf course.”

Scoring Heintzelman is something of a staffing coup for the new ownership, as is retaining Superintendent John Sadowski and Director of Golf George Goich.

“I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t stay for the area, the property or the golf course,” says Goich, 43, a pro since 1998 and originally from the Chicago area. “I stayed for the members. These are some of the nicest people I’ve met in the business. They’re self-made folks. They have a collective belief in this place. There’s no ego. I’ve been at a lot of phenomenal clubs and there are good and bad people everywhere, but I’d have a hard time picking someone to throw out of this club.”

The golf course, meanwhile, speaks for itself. Designed by Dana Fry at 7,080 yards, the par-72 features crushed limestone and quartz bunkering and five tee boxes on each hole. Turner Hill was named one of the nation’s 10 best new private courses in 2005 by Travel & Leisure Golf magazine. It was the site for the $75,000 New England PGA Championships last summer.

“The facilities are unbelievable, so special, in fact, you can’t appreciate them unless you make a visit,” says Heintzelman, the ’97 NEPGA champ who was a member of the PGA Tour in 1989 and 1990. “I’ve played everywhere and of the country’s newer championship courses, these are the nicest greens you’ll putt.”

“We’re going to break the mold and the stigma that the best golf courses to join are those that have already had two previous owners,” says new member-owner O’Neil. “By definition, this group will make decisions that are best for the members. Once the residences are completed, that will only be an asset to the whole project and the social aspect of membership.”

Realtor Steve Archer reports that “the current residents have created a real sense of community and we’re starting to get a lot of activity,” while Raymond predicts Turner Hill “will probably become one of the choicest places to live on the North Shore in terms of services, exclusivity and property value.”

With the links and the property’s most versatile and most appealing public-use building in the hands of the golfers, is fortune poised to shine on Turner Hill after a decade of, well, Scottish-style gloom?

“It was always our intention that this be a private-equity club,” says Raymond Property Company Vice President Charlie Reed, who served as project manager of Turner Hill from 1997 to 2005. “This is the best disposition for the club. From a land-planning standpoint, we achieved all our goals. What’s my biggest regret? I wish the permitting process hadn’t been so excruciating. Things might have been different.”

Raymond Property may have envisioned precisely this exit strategy, but surely not under these circumstances. And Raymond himself certainly didn’t anticipate taking a brutal loss on the project, which, without question, he will. On the grandest of scales, however, the shimmering light on the Hill that captivated one of Ipswich’s own as a lad may finally be positioned exactly where it’s supposed to be.

“The long and the short of it is that it’s turning out well for the members,” Raymond says. “I think everyone agrees that the golf course is one of the best around and they have a tremendous asset in the mansion and the clubhouse.

“Business is business,” he continues. “But in terms of being able to carry off something that people can look at and appreciate on many levels, we achieved our goals. The proof is in the pudding and a lot of people worked very hard to make that happen.”

“I guess a lot of people have a lot of printable and unprintable things to say about Ted Raymond and what happened here,” says Goich. “The way I choose to look at it is, without him, this great golf course wouldn’t be here. It’s just time to move on.”

– A Gloucester resident, Chad Konecky serves as National Director of Gatorade’s Player of the Year Program in his capacity as a senior editorial staffer at RISE Magazine, a Sports Illustrated partner.