The Golf Cart Errand Loop Built Into Coral Ridge Country Club Estates

You can grab groceries at The Fresh Market, drop off dry cleaning, get your nails done, and eat dinner at an Italian restaurant without ever pulling onto Federal Highway. If you live in Coral Ridge Country Club Estates and you own a golf cart, you already know this. What you might not know is that none of it happened by accident. It happened because a hurricane wrecked a public golf course in 2005, and the people who owned the land next door decided to rebuild the whole corner at once.

That's the part of the story worth knowing if you live here. This isn't a neighborhood that slowly accumulated conveniences over decades. It's a neighborhood where homes, a retail anchor, two parks, and a golf course addition all came out of a single redevelopment deal, which is why the whole northeast corner of the community feels stitched together instead of bolted on.

What used to be here

Before any of the current Enclave existed, the 75-acre parcel at the entrance to Coral Ridge Country Club Estates belonged to the American Golfers Club, a public course that closed after Hurricane Wilma tore through it in 2005. For years the land sat as damaged, unused acreage next to an otherwise thriving private club, the kind of gap that shows up on aerial photos long after everyone stops talking about the storm that caused it.

The site didn't get rebuilt into a copy of what was there before. J.J. Sehlke, who played junior golf at Coral Ridge Country Club in 1980 and now serves as its managing partner, worked with majority owner Phil Smith and the development firm Stiles to turn the old public course into something with more moving parts: a gated home community, a new short course for the club, a public park, and a retail center, all released in stages starting with a friends-and-family home site program.

One deal, four outcomes

Most Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods get their homes from one developer, their shopping center from another, and their parks from the city on a completely separate timeline. Coral Ridge Country Club Estates got three of those four things from the same joint venture, planned together.

The residential piece became The Enclave at Coral Ridge Country Club, 36 home sites spread across 22 acres, with individual lots ranging from just over 18,000 square feet to nearly 50,000 square feet, some measuring more than an acre. Because these were raw home sites rather than spec houses, buyers in the friends-and-family release had latitude to build what they wanted rather than choose from a builder's floor plan.

At the entrance to those home sites, the same ownership group built The Enclave Shops at Coral Ridge, a 27,300 square foot retail center anchored by a 21,000 square foot Fresh Market. Sehlke has described the payoff in plain terms: residents can drive your golf cart right up to The Fresh Market to get your groceries. That's not a metaphor about walkability. It's a literal description of how people in this pocket of the neighborhood do their errands.

Behind the shops, the same project delivered Mangurian Park, a public park that had its ribbon cutting not long after the shops opened and was turned over to the city rather than kept as a private amenity. And on the club's own grounds, the ownership group added a nine-hole course to complement the original layout, giving members a second golf option that didn't exist before the redevelopment.

Two golf architects, one course

The country club at the center of the neighborhood isn't new. It was founded in 1954, with its original 18-hole layout designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., one of the most prolific golf architects of the twentieth century. What changed in 2015 was the addition of a second course on the property: the Rees 9, a par-3 layout designed by Jones Sr.'s son, Rees Jones, who has his own long career designing and redesigning courses across the country.

It's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that tells you this club has been treated as a long-term asset rather than a static amenity. Sixty years after the first course opened, the ownership brought in the son of the original architect to add something new rather than letting the property stand still. Membership at the club remains separate from home ownership in the neighborhood and is by invitation, so the course itself isn't something every resident automatically has access to. But its presence, and its continued investment, shapes the character of the streets around it regardless of who holds a membership card.

The tenant mix hasn't changed much, and that's the point

Walk into The Enclave Shops today and you'll find roughly the same small footprint the original plan called for: The Fresh Market, an Italian restaurant called Rossini, a pilates studio, and a nail salon. This is not a shopping center that grew into a strip mall over time. It has stayed a tight, four-tenant lot with direct frontage on Federal Highway, which means it still functions the way it was designed to: a quick stop, not a destination.

That matters for anyone weighing what convenience actually looks like here. This isn't a Publix-anchored plaza a fifteen-minute drive away. It's a grocery store built at the literal entrance to the home sites, sized and positioned so that a resident on a golf cart is a realistic customer, not a marketing image.

The neighborhood keeps adding to itself

The original redevelopment deal is now roughly a decade old, but the pattern of the community reinvesting in its own public space hasn't stopped. The Coral Ridge Country Club Estates Community Association, the voluntary group open to all residents, has continued to fund improvements on its own. Its initiatives page states that the association's board secured $250,000 to upgrade Bayview Park, a project aimed squarely at making the neighborhood's shared outdoor space safer and more usable for families already living here.

The association also keeps a social calendar running. Its website highlights a member appreciation party held at Coral Ridge Country Club in February 2025, which drew around 150 residents for an afternoon of food and conversation, with the association's own security patrol officers attending to put faces to names. The group publishes a resident magazine as well, currently in its August and September 2026 issue, under the direction of community president Tim Hernandez.

None of this is required. A homeowners association could exist purely to enforce landscaping rules and collect dues. This one is still actively raising money for parks and organizing in-person gatherings a decade after the original Enclave deal closed, which suggests the self-contained feel of the neighborhood is something residents have chosen to keep building rather than something they inherited and left alone.

Why this is worth knowing if you already live here

The easy version of this story is "there's a grocery store and a park nearby." The more useful version is that Coral Ridge Country Club Estates got its grocery store, its two parks, its second golf course, and its home sites from one coordinated redevelopment of a hurricane-damaged golf course, and that the community has kept investing in that same footprint ever since. That's a different kind of convenience than most Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods can claim. It didn't happen because retail followed rooftops the way it usually does. It happened because one ownership group decided a damaged golf course was an opportunity to build several things residents would actually use, all at once, and residents have spent the years since making sure that investment didn't stop at the ribbon cutting.

If you're weighing what your own corner of the neighborhood offers, or you're curious how a specific street relates to the Enclave, the Rees 9, or the shops at the entrance, Vicki Annecca at Elite Florida Homes has spent two decades tracking how these pockets of Coral Ridge fit together. You can also browse the full Coral Ridge Country Club Estates neighborhood guide for a closer look at what's nearby, or read our earlier piece on new construction trends in Coral Ridge Country Club Estates if you're curious how the Enclave's original home sites have been built out since.