The Quechee Club's New Building Got Its Certificate Of Occupancy. Two Days Later, It Flooded.
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
On July 8, 2023, Quechee Club general manager Brian Kelley announced that the certificates of occupancy had come through. The new beach house at Lake Pinneo and the recreation building next to it were done, inspected, and ready for the height of summer. Two days later, on July 10, the Upper Valley flooded. The Club shut down, Lake Pinneo's water access was suspended, and the buildings that had just cleared final inspection sat through months of cleanup without ever opening to a single member.
If you've spent the last few summers wondering why the construction fencing around the recreation campus never seemed to move, that's the reason. Not a slow contractor. Not a stalled budget. A finished building that got hit by weather before anyone got to use it.
The renovation itself didn't start in 2023. Quechee Lakes Landowners Association members first saw a version of this master plan in 2010. It didn't get approved. It took until 2022, under a board led by president Kathy Hickey and facilities planning chair Kevin Roden, for membership to approve phase one in full. Trade press covering private clubs called it the largest capital project in the Club's 52-year history.
Part of the push came from who was actually living at Quechee Lakes by 2022. Kelley, who arrived as general manager in the summer of 2020, told GreaterUpperValley.com that the average age of Club members had dropped from about 65 to 58 in just a few years, as older owners cashed out during a hot real estate market and younger families relocated to rural Vermont during the pandemic. A club built around a 65-year-old membership and a club built around a 58-year-old membership want different things from a recreation barn. Phase one was the answer: a second floor and new mechanical systems for the Recreation Camp Barn, four new pickleball courts, relocated platform tennis with two additional courts, new shower and locker facilities at Lake Pinneo, a snack bar, a cart barn, and dormitory-style employee housing above a storage building that was also converting the golf fleet from gas to electric carts.
None of that is speculative anymore. It's built. What took an extra year to actually open is the piece that got caught by the flood.
The July 2023 flood didn't just delay a ribbon-cutting. Cleanup and restoration on the Club's campus and golf course ran for months. The two buildings that had already passed inspection, the beach house and the recreation building, sat unused through the rest of that summer and into the next year. They had a certificate of occupancy but no occupants.
By the summer of 2024, the recreation building reopened under a new name: the Den. It became base camp for the Club's youth and family programming, and Lake Pinneo opened on Father's Day weekend as it traditionally does, with the rebuilt beach house finally doing the job it was built for two years earlier, serving sunset views and lakeside ice cream.
The people running that reopening weren't the same people who'd planned the original building. Julia Ferguson and Joe Grizzle had been interns in the Club's recreation department back in 2023, present for the flood but not yet in charge of anything. By 2024 they were leading the department, and they used the delay as a reset rather than a simple reopening.
"We're breathing some new life into recreation at the Club," Ferguson said. "We have a good foundation, but it's time for some funky-fresh things."
That's not marketing language written after the fact. It's a recreation director describing a real decision: instead of just switching the lights back on in the same building with the same programming, the Club rebuilt its youth offerings around a wider range of ages than the original plan had accounted for.
The most visible shift was a new Teen Adventure Program for ages 13 to 17, something the Club hadn't had a dedicated structure for before. It launched with a beach party at Lake Pinneo and ran Thursday through Saturday into mid-August, mixing on-campus nights with off-campus trips to Tip Top Pottery, Killington Adventure Park, Six Flags New England, and a minor league baseball game. A Counselor In Training track gave older kids who'd grown up in the camp system a path into more responsibility rather than aging out entirely.
The rest of the campus kept its rhythm. Members still gather for:
None of that needed the flood to change. What changed is the piece of the campus built specifically for kids and teens, which is now doing more than the 2022 master plan originally described, because the people running it had an extra year to figure out what was missing.
Phase one is finished. The Den is open, the beach house serves ice cream on schedule, the racquet complex has its pickleball courts, and the electric cart conversion is underway in the new storage building. But talk to anyone who follows the Club closely and you'll hear that the master plan itself isn't done. As of mid-2026, the Club's own materials still describe a phased campus-wide renovation as underway, with more amenity areas expected to change.
That matters if you're trying to read the construction signs correctly. What you're seeing on the ground right now isn't flood recovery anymore. That chapter closed in 2024. What's ongoing now is the next phase of a plan members have been discussing in some form since 2010, which finally found the votes in 2022 and is still working through a longer list than most residents realize.
The golf courses themselves, meanwhile, have already been through their own version of this story. Both Lakeland and Highland were restored by architect Brian Silva back in 2012 after Tropical Storm Irene, a reminder that this isn't the Club's first time rebuilding after Vermont weather. It won't be the last.
The easy version of this story is "the Club got hit by a flood, then rebuilt." The more accurate version is that two separate timelines collided. One was a member-driven capital plan more than a decade in the making, aimed at a membership that had gotten noticeably younger. The other was a single week of Vermont weather that happened to land two days after a set of buildings passed inspection. The Den you walk into today, and the teen program your kids might age into this summer, exist because those two timelines overlapped in a specific and unlucky way, and because two former interns decided not to just reopen what had been planned but to build something a little different once they had the chance.
That's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet, but it's the kind of thing that tells you what living at Quechee Lakes is actually like day to day, not just what the brochure promises.
If you're weighing what a home inside Quechee Lakes is worth this fall, given everything that's changed on the amenity side since 2022, VTNH Realty can walk you through it. Request a free home valuation and we'll factor in what the Club looks like today, not what an old listing photo says it looked like five years ago.
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