Many North Texas leaders belong to country clubs—or something like them—that are carefully curated in membership, and prohibitively pricey to most all but the region’s 1 percent. These private clubs count as members some of the state’s most prominent investors, oil executives, athletes, real estate magnates, politicians, and political kingmakers.
Here, we take you behind the mahogany doors of Dallas-Fort Worth’s most exclusive—and most publicity-averse—enclaves of the elite. These aren’t solely country clubs, to be sure, though access to some of the finest golf in North America is often one of the perks of membership. In addition to old-line golf clubs, we identified, for example, an über-ritzy residential development, where membership is won with the purchase of real estate on the prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth.
We also included an office park—built on the red-bricked bones of an old public hospital—that’s more selective of its tenants than almost any of the venerable country-club bastions of Dallas society. In these posh clubs the key to access is not only money, but connections—and patience. In most cases, the members have all three.
